Some of this spiritual quality breaks through into Ripper, her first foray into detective fiction.
The story, set in San Francisco, gets traction late in the book, and I found the character definition confusing. As with earlier Allende books, women take lead roles. In Allende's own words more or less: ''The sleuth is not a handsome detective or journalist or policeman. It's a young, 16-year-old nerd. Her female champion is not a wanton, beautiful, dark-haired, thin lady. It's a buxom, blonde healer''.
The two are the Jackson women, mother and daughter, Indiana and Amanda, as different as chalk and cheese. Indiana is an unconventional free-spirited holistic healer, while Amanda, a high school senior, is a teen sleuth hooked on crime novels and a gruesome online game called Ripper. Her interests are hardly surprising as her father (long divorced from her mother), is San Francisco police deputy chief of homicide.
The plot revolves around Amanda and Ripper, the online mystery game she plays with her grandfather and international friends (including one in Auckland), and her inquiry into a string of unusual murders happening across the city. She discovers, before the police do, the links to all the murders.
As Allende said in an interview, ''the book is tongue-in-cheek''. By her own admission, Allende took the genre, wrote a mystery that is faithful to the formula and what the readers expect, but it is a joke.
- Ted Fox is a Dunedin online marketing consultant.
