An Unholy Alliance is Truly an Unholy Read

Being a writer has taught me to appreciate the effort, the blood, sweat, angst and tears that are invested in a novel. I understand just how difficult it can be to drive those stubborn nails home and hope to God the damn thing floats -- and that someone somewhere will love my handiwork and spread the word. But I am also a firm believer that, while some people are born to write, others are not.

Unfortunately, my journey towards author-status has somewhat ruined my ability to simply pick up a book and enjoy it. Belonging to the plethora of critique groups, most of my reading consists of loosely bound stacks of double-spaced, 12-point, plain type manuscripts. And they often contain almost as many pen marks as they do words. So when I was offered the opportunity to do a book review, I thought this might be a great time to just unwind and slip into someone else's world.

Judy Nedry's An Unholy Alliance follows Emma Golden, a divorced woman in her fifties who agrees to watch over her friend's bed and breakfast in Oregon's renowned wine country while she is away. Emma has just signed a contract with a publisher to write a book about the wine scene and, though agreeing to help her friend means returning to her old stomping grounds and facing the demons she had left behind, she sees it as a good opportunity to research her book. Several days after her arrival at an extravagant dinner party at Cougar Crossing, one of the area's newer wineries, Emma stumbles upon the grandiose but brutish body of Ted Maxell, owner of the Crossing and Oregon's most notorious newcomer, floating in one of the wine vats. Emma quickly finds that there are many people in the area who would want Maxell dead, but the question that seems to be making its way throughout the wineries of Oregon is: who wanted him dead most of all?

I didn't have many expectations when I first began reading this book. My tastes do not usually include mystery and suspense, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to try something new. Well, if all mysteries are like this, then I now understand why I don't read them. The book is approximately three hundred pages long, and yet it took almost a hundred pages to get to the murder. That left a whole lot of empty space to fill. I suppose it wouldn't have been so bad if I weren't anticipating a murder, but because I knew this was a mystery novel, I was waiting for the mystery to begin, not expecting to follow Emma on her daily routine of taking care of her friend's winery and gathering research for her book. Yes, a few skeletons came out of her closet during these pages, but I did not think there was enough fleshing out of the characters to actually have me empathize with them. They remained hollow, and, I have to admit, I was somewhat disappointed.

When the murder finally took place*, I gave the book another chance, only to be let down again. About two chapters after the murder, the reader is back with Emma, happily going about her daily routine of entertaining guests at the bed and breakfast and taking a detour into a subplot of her past alcoholism and the friends she needed to leave behind. The murder was still lingering in the background, but for me the plot had grown stagnant. And this downturn didn't take into consideration the grammatical and spelling errors that smacked me in the face. Again, as an up-and-coming author, I understand how a few spelling misteaks (ha!) can take your credibility down a notch, but misspelling your own characters' names -- not once, but several times -- is bad for business. Alas, I slipped back into critique-mode, and the escape I had been looking for unfortunately did not manifest.

Now, I don't know if I am completely masochistic, or I just love (Cult)ure Magazine too much, but I did finish the book. It took me four months to do it, but I prevailed. Perhaps it was because I was already jaded or that I felt like I was back in grade 11 reading one of those crappy books they force on you in English class, but I was not surprised when Emma finally revealed who the killer was; to be honest, it was an anti-climax. The entire setup was not very believable, given that Emma was simply unfortunate enough to be at the scene of the murder. She was fed information from anyone she asked, and, if she didn't get it the first time around, they spilled the beans in round two. What bothered me the most, though, was that her 'inside man' was a reporter who she briefly met the night of the murder, and throughout the rest of the book he continued to happily pass along police intelligence to a woman with whom he had no other connection. Not my idea of someone on the inside. The trust factor slipped a little for me, and unfortunately it is this final failure that prompts me to never recommend this book to friends.

*Correction: Place was initially mistyped as 'plave' and corrected on April 2, 2010.

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