Wordhunter: A Novel
“a mixed-qualities novel that will appeal to a mixed audience.”
Ever heard of “forensic linguistics”?
Whether yes or no, it’s certainly a fresh twist in detective fiction for forensic linguistics to be the sleuth’s college degree and crime-solving tool. As a field for eventual employment, it’s the only good option for young language savant, Maggie Moore.
Maggie’s story will fascinate word lovers because of its premise and investigative techniques. Whether these will carry the book for mystery lovers in general, however, depends on how much they like language intricacies and subplot sidetracks and character quirks and mean streets and trash mouth.
The core plot is how Maggie, a brilliant forensic linguist who calms and amuses herself by diagramming sentences, gets recruited by police to analyze notes left by a rapist. Then, after her feedback swiftly leads to the arrest of the right man, she is drawn in again to help discover who abducted the mayor’s daughter.
That case links to her personal backstory, which explains her neuroses and eccentricities—of which there are many. So many that it feels like the author went down a checklist of character defects and family-origin miseries to see how many she could fold in. The result is a sharp detective novel that would be novella length if it were not overburdened by distractions and pathos that lame the story.
The jacket blurb describes Maggie as “Tattooed, pierced, and a bit of a mess.” While the tattooing and piercing are accurate, Maggie is more than “a bit” of a mess. She ingests so much booze, garbage food, nicotine, and pills; rides so recklessly on her motorcycle, has such lousy relationships, dishes out and accepts so much meanness and verbal abuse—with some sexual abuse thrown in like frosting on a cake—that it’s hard to believe she can function, never mind perform at an extremely high intellectual level.
But maybe that’s the point. Her super-brain gets her out of the cliché white-trash muck of south-central Florida into advanced schooling and career opportunity, as well as the chance to do some good in the world. And find some potential romance on the way.
The narrative zips along through her unique viewpoint, peppered with quotations, sentence diagrams, and dialogue. The latter, unfortunately, often sounds like juvenile insult-swapping and conveys little information to advance the plot. It also creates more unlikeable characters than not.
Still, the pieces hang together enough for the book to be optioned by a major studio for a TV treatment. Changing media might get around the book’s structural flaw: the prologue.
Most genre-novel readers expect that whatever question a prologue raises will be answered by the end of the story. In Wordhunter, the mysterious and seemingly violent disappearance of Maggie’s best friend, years before, opens the narrative. Even after the police stop looking for the girl, Maggie never gives up. In the book’s current time frame, Maggie finally makes some progress in finding her long-lost friend while helping the cops find the rapist and kidnapper.
But after the current crimes are resolved, nothing definitive is established about the crime introduced in the prologue. Instead the author uses that open mystery as a hook into what presumably will become a series. “Presumably” applies because nothing in the packaging, promotional materials, or the author’s website suggests that Wordhunter is volume one of an ongoing tale.
Some readers will find this unfair, especially if they read mystery, crime, and suspense because they want the resolution and justice that characterize these genres. In Wordhunter we can blame the publishing house for not asking the author to weave the missing-friend flashback into the main narrative. That’s a missed opportunity on three fronts.
First, they would avoid the disappointment of an expectation unfulfilled for readers who might otherwise recommend the novel to others or buy another. Second, the missing-friend mystery is more compelling than the kidnapping mystery, and solving it would bring a more emotionally satisfying reward for the heroine (and reader) than what she accomplishes. Third, solving the crime on both fronts would better support her progress from the dumps to the heights.
Therefore, Wordhunter can best be described as a mixed-qualities novel that will appeal to a mixed audience.