Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Imagine a mystery whose protagonist gets her greatest enjoyment from diagramming sentences.  You can’t, can you?  I would have agreed with you until I read Wordhunter by Stella Sands.  It’s a brilliant, original, captivating plot, with a brilliant, original, captivating protagonist; my apologies for repeating myself, something Maggie Moore would never have done.

Maggie is a grad student studying forensics at a small university in the town of Rosedale, Florida.  She’s enrolled in The Language of Film seminar with Professor Ditmire, among her other courses.  He tells her he’s received a phone call from a police detective in a nearby town where a woman has been receiving threatening notes from a cyberstalker, and the detective is hoping someone getting a degree in forensics will see a clue in the notes that will help catch the writer.

This is how Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was captured after terrorizing the nation for 20 years, killing three people and wounding 23 others.  FBI experts, analyzing the notes, theorized that the killer had Chicago roots based on the language of his writing, and that eventually led to his arrest.

Maggie meets Detective Silas Jackson, who gives her the emails the cyberstalker sent to the woman who was murdered shortly after Maggie was hired.  He also gives her four other emails sent by different suspects.  After examining them for linguistic tells, Maggie picks one because of the writer’s style and word usage, saying his writing shows he was from Louisiana.

She advises Jackson to check him out.  Although the detective is obviously having a hard time believing this is a valid way to find the criminal, he does what she suggests and, in fact, the writer of that email proves to be the woman’s killer.

Then a call comes from Jackson’s boss, Chief Murray.  The daughter of the mayor of a nearby town has been kidnapped, but this time Maggie says “I’m sorry.  But I can’t help you,” and flees the police station.

Subsequently Maggie changes her mind, deciding to help Murray after very reluctantly sharing her backstory with Jackson.  She confides that she’s been traumatized since her best friend Lucy disappeared nearly a decade earlier.  Maggie has tried everything possible to find her but without success.  Now the search for fourteen-year-old Heidi Hemphill is on, bringing with it a decade of memories.

In addition, Maggie’s relationship with Ditmire is getting shaky.  She wants to get her master’s degree and go to work, but he’s insisting that she go for her doctorate.  He begins badmouthing her favorite professor and doesn’t take it well when Maggie proves to know more about a particular topic than he does.  His temper appears to be  getting worse, but Maggie keeps this to herself.  All she wants to do is graduate and get out of Rosedale.

Maggie Moore is an atypical heroine–tattooed, pierced, cigarette and pot smoking, alone in the world.  But her stubbornness or determination, call it what you will, is strong enough to keep her focused on the search for the missing teenager, all the while still searching for her childhood friend and now trying to keep her distance from Ditmire.

Stella Sands has written a compelling mystery about a feisty and gifted young woman, one who has come a long way on her own and wants nothing more than to continue on that road.  Ms. Sands is the author of six true-crime books; Wordhunter is her first novel.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

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