Rebecca Rothenberg was one of five authors Elizabeth Foxwell highlighted as female mystery writers who left us too soon. In Rothenberg's case, she died in 1998 of a brain tumor at the age of 50. In addition to being an author, Rothenberg was a musician, epidemiologist and amateur botanist. Her series with microbiologist Claire Sharples included three books in all (with a fourth finished by her friend Taffy Cannon), beginning with The Bulrush Murders in 1991, only seven years before the author's death. It went on to be named as one of the Top Ten Mysteries of the year by the Los Angeles Times and was nominated for the Agatha and Anthony awards (appropriate in advance of next week's Bouchercon conference).
The Bulrush Murders introduces us to Claire Sharples, who is feeling like one of her caged laboratory rats, working in MIT's research facilities. On an impulse, she takes an agricultural research job in a rural part of California's San Joaquin Valley, only to discover that the bleak region is most notable for its absences of rain, decent conversation, jazz music and good Thai restaurants. When a young Hispanic friend drives plunges his motorcycle into a reservoir, Claire investigates the circumstances surrounding his death with the help of her new enigmatic coworker Sam. She soon finds herself unhappily drawn to the ill-mannered field scientist Sam, to the suspicious death that indicates it wasn't an accident, and to the mystery of why a Mexican farm family's crops seem to be the only ones in the San Joaquin Valley suffering from a blight. Even the death in Vietnam of the young murdered man's brother might not be what it first seemed.
Rothenberg created an appealing fish-out-water protagonist in Claire, who has one foot in two different worlds and not a single foot on a firm emotional foundation:
No mistaking which "community" she belonged to—not of souls but of namers, the Community of Scientists: a bunch of self-absorbed misanthropic misfits who retreated from the demands and ambiguities of the world into their self-created, logical, orderly systems, devising technical solutions to spiritual problems...and me, she thought. I'm like that. Sometimes I think I'm not because--why? Because I'm female? Because I have the vocabulary to talk about feelings? But I'm just like them: give me a touch intellectual puzzle and I perform like an integrated circuit; put me in a situation requiring an emotional response and I fall apart. Or else I concert it to an algorithm, a model, a problem I can solve. Something I can "look up."
The Los Angeles Times Book Review's Charles Champlin called The Bulrush Murders "A spellbinding first mystery ...[an ] intricate and action-rich plot...At the story's center, always, is an affecting and insightful portrait of a bright woman struggling for simple equality in an environment as prickly and hostile as some of the wild grasses the author describes so well." Kirkus Reviews added, "A convincing look at racism in southern California, agricultural hardships, and the difficulty that arises when opposites fall in love. A judicious balance of science and emotion, then, and a better-than-average debut."
The other two books in the series by Rothenberg are The Dandelion Murders and The Shy Tulip Murders, and the novel completed by Taffy Cannon is titled The Tumbleweed Murders.
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