Killer Pancake by Diane Mott Davidson

I don't think I had read this one before. There were a couple of incidents that I really think I would have remembered - like the body falling out of the wall in the department store - and Julian having a serious girlfriend (although she only lasted a few pages). More significant to the way my memory works for series fiction though is the "new marriage" uncertainty that is laced through the whole story. The previous book in the series, The Last Suppers, was set around Goldy and Tom's delayed wedding and Tom's kidnapping. I remembered the kidnapping and the wedding craziness, but very little about the crimes and the story behind them.

In this one, the marriage is just a couple of months old and while there is some of the "newly wedded bliss" that one would expect, Davidson concentrates on another and very realistic aspect of "new marriage" which is generally overlooked. Of course, Tom and Goldy are "non-trads" where marriage is concerned. Tom, in his mid to late thirties, has never married, and Goldy is the survivor of a brutally abusive marriage. Davidson makes it clear that they love each other very much, and that they never fear that an argument is going to be the end of it - but she deals with the day to day uncertainties of a new marriage. Goldy spent the years after the end of her first marriage redefining her life as her own, and now she is consciously redefining again - from "mine" to "ours." Davidson captures the inevitable ambivalence of a woman who has, with considerable effort, learned to set her own boundaries and create her own life on her own terms resetting those boundaries in terms of a new relationship.

Her uncertainties lead her into error in both directions. Overconfidence in her new life makes her careless with security which leaves her open to an attack by her vicious ex who comes to pick up Arch for his weekend. Lack of confidence makes her unwilling to share with Tom some of the critical incidents that might have saved problems.

Maybe a part of the reason that I remember the extended background story and not the crimes in these books is that the background story has substance (compared, for example, to the "recipe" mysteries by Joanne Fluke) and the crimes often originate in motives which are very human and trivial to anyone besides the criminal him/herself. That might also account for the fact that Hannah and her silliness are beginning to annoy me, but Goldy and company are definitely not.