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Past Pretense (Patricia Delaney Egumshoe Mystery, #2)

Sharon Short

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Sep 04, 2014 Michiko Katsu rated it did not like it

Past Pretense is based on a hackneyed plot where someone’s past comes back to haunt them and in their attempt to undo what can’t be undone they are..well…undone. Added to the overdone plot, Past Pretense doesn’t deliver on anything that hasn’t been done and redone a million times before. This is also an update to the original published in 1994 and the antiquated computer references make that obvious. Given there is no value to keeping the old references, Short would have assisted its re-release Past Pretense is based on a hackneyed plot where someone’s past comes back to haunt them and in their attempt to undo what can’t be undone they are..well…undone. Added to the overdone plot, Past Pretense doesn’t deliver on anything that hasn’t been done and redone a million times before. This is also an update to the original published in 1994 and the antiquated computer references make that obvious. Given there is no value to keeping the old references, Short would have assisted its re-release with updated references and reduced the feeling of the story being unnecessarily outdated.
Gigi Lafferty wakes with a start as a dream of being chased pulls her from her marital bed, one that is not made of love and reassurances but rather a gilded cage of security and control. From the beginning, the relationship between Neil and Gigi is forced and uncomfortable. Short does a good job of creating a character, in Neil, whom you know cannot be trusted.
Neil is cold and calculating as he positions his self-made fortune from Lafferty Products into a political future in the Cincinnati area. Gigi was an affair which preempted his divorce from the mother of his one and only son, Allen, a once potential Olympian in swimming who now works for him and is later revealed to be gay and having an affair with Gregory who also works for Lafferty Products.
Gigi seeks out Patricia Delaney who is an Investigative Consultant, a title to which she makes special note on multiple occasions, which is different than a Private Investigator although there really doesn’t seem to be any difference. Gigi wants Patricia to do a background check on her to see what she can find. The two women knew each other years ago when Gigi, then called Loretta King, was an exotic dancer and Patricia, a bouncer, worked at a place called Poppy’s Parrot.
Patricia eventually remembers she knew Gigi but only after she goes to her house to collect on her services only to find it ransacked and a dead girl floating in the pool. She jumps in thinking it’s Gigi only to find it’s Jessica, a secretary-type who worked at Lafferty Products and was having an affair with Neil. She also used to work at Poppy’s Parrot and turns out to have been blackmailing Gigi and Allen.
Patricia does not immediately call the police but instead searches the house for clues as it appears that Gigi took her stuff, some money and fled the scene. When she does finally call the cops she becomes a suspect because of her past and present relationship with Gigi.
The addition of the police serves no purpose. No part of their investigation is revelatory and if they were taken out of the story completely nothing would suffer. Even as a suspect, Patricia is at most questioned by an unjustifiably angry rookie and his more matronly senior partner whom Patricia exchanges information with from time-to-time but always as supposition and innuendo.
There’s a romantic pseudo sub-plot between Patricia and Dean who owns the bar where she plays drums. She had a fiancé who committed suicide which keeps her from getting into another relationship but as with the inclusion of the police, serves no purpose but a distraction from the main plot. The purpose of a sub-plot is to enhance or in some way merge into the primary plot in a way that serves a key purpose but this feels as if it’s just meant to underline her heterosexuality. Given the homosexual relationship between Allen and Gregory is a key plot point later revealed, it might have been to provide balance or opposites in the story but if that’s the case it was not executed well.
There are so many holes in the story it’s hard to believe anything after a while. Why doesn’t Gigi just tell Patricia who she is and leverage the favor she owes her right off the bat? Why the secrecy when it serves no purpose? If Gigi was so intent on getting away from her past then why did she go back to the same city where she danced? Jessica caught Gigi (then known to her as Loretta King) crying over the obituary of Eugene Neumann whom Gigi explained was the father of a friend. Is it even plausible, after fourteen years, that Jessica not only remember his name but somehow deduced that he was her father and Loretta King was an alias then tracked her down after being released from prison? Knowing Jessica is a convicted murderer, is she that “charismatic” that Gigi is duped into getting Neil to give her a job? The quetions go on and on.
Finally there is no closure. Yes, the bad guy is revealed but in such a ridiculous way it would be funny if it wasn’t done intentionally. The typical end-of-the-story reveal where the good guy gets the bad guy to reveal all the sorted details then escapes and uses the details against him is not only the way the story goes but is even called out, very specifically, by the bad guy as the stereotypical ending yet that is exactly what happens (“You want me to talk?...Satisfy the brave detective just before her demise, isn’t that the way it’s supposed to go? Satisfy the bad guy’s urge to brag. Then the detective finds a way out. I’ll talk. But you’re not finding a way out…”).
After that the story just ends. There are multiple open and unanswered questions yet Short doesn’t seem to feel as if they need to be answered. What happens to Gregory? Does Patricia keep her promise to Jessica’s grandmother? Just like the story, there are more questions than answers.
The most frustrating part of the entire book is the poor to completely non-existent editing. Words are misspelled, punctuation is missing and misused, sentences stop on one line then pick up on another, multiple characters’ dialogue are in the same paragraph. Considering this is supposed to be an updated version of the previous, it’s unclear what, if anything, was updated. Even a basic word processing package (although a highly inadequate book editing tool) would have caught many of these problems.
Given there are so many other, better, options in the mystery/suspense category, Past Pretense is better left in the past with or without the pretense.
I received a free copy of this book through Story Cartel for an unbiased review. ...more

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