Blood on a Blue Moon
Jessica H. Stone
North Street Book Prize 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Genre Fiction
Critique by Jendi Reiter
A small-time insurance investigator winds up doing a good job despite herself in Jessica H. Stone's Blood on a Blue Moon, a cozy, comical murder mystery set in a Seattle-area houseboat community.
Our lovable dirtbag narrator, Sheaffer Blue, is like Eleanor from The Good Place dropped into a Murder, She Wrote episode. Typically hungover, with a short attention span for men and careers, Blue is passionate about one thing: Ink Spot, the sailboat where she lives. The insurance job was meant to be just brief enough to pay for boat repairs so she could sail to Mexico. However, when she's sent to investigate a houseboat fire in which an elderly woman died, Blue's basic decency and curiosity drive her to solve the homicide. She's also tempted to stick around for an opposites-attract romance with David Chen, a visiting detective from San Francisco, who is as neat and responsible as she is chaotic.
The murdered woman was a leader in the houseboat community resisting gentrification—a charming and feisty group of pot-smoking seniors who know a thing or two about fighting the Man. The unscrupulous developer who wants to evict them is the insurance agency's client, putting Blue at odds with her boss.
Blood on a Blue Moon resembles those old-fashioned TV crime dramas, like Columbo or Monk, where the villain was pretty obvious and someone you loved to hate, and the pleasure of the episode came not from suspense, but from watching your favorite crime-solver display their unique quirks and talents to tighten the net around the perpetrator. Blue is a witty narrator who can laugh at her own foibles and doesn't always give herself credit for her courage and smarts. She satirizes social pretensions but never punches down.
We're often disappointed by ageism in our contest entries. When older folks show up in stories at all, they're depicted as unattractive or pathetic. Blood on a Blue Moon stood out for giving its seniors an active love life, the competence to drive major plot points, and most of all, a sense of fun. Even the neighbor who was on the edge of dementia was still a talented painter; her artwork contained a clue about who had visited the dead woman's boat right before the fire.
First-round judge Annie Mydla said, "Overall, this is a well-constructed and specific-feeling mystery novel. That said, like many mysteries we receive, I did find that the story of the villains imperfectly complements the base layer of the story, Sheaffer and her grungy boat life. There's too much contrast, and the story of the crime doesn't end up saying enough about Sheaffer."
Without giving away spoilers, I would add that I didn't find it plausible that one of the suspects would have confessed to a long-ago crime in writing. The author should have come up with a subtler but still important piece of evidence for the characters to hunt down. Broadly drawn supporting characters are part of the comedic technique in this sub-genre, but Blue's woo-woo best friend could have been dialed back by half and still have plenty of patchouli to go around.
Light-hearted books that still make room for a progressive message are a highlight of my job as a North Street judge. I'd definitely pick up another installment of Blue's adventures.
