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by Joseph M. Champlin
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by Fodor's
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by Jon L Williams
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by Edgar Rice Burroughs
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Cyanide Wells
by Marcia Muller
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Mysterious Press (2003-08)
ISBN: 0892967811
EAN: 9780892967810
Dewy Decimal #: 813.54
Hardcover: 304 pages
SKU: mon0000039456
Condition: Very Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
When Matthew Lindstrom's wifeGwen disappeared, his comfortable life was destroyed by suspicion and innuendo. But 14 years later, Matthew receives an anonymous phone call saying Gwen is alive-and well aware of what her disappearance has done to him. Now, Matthew is on his way to Soledad County in Northern California in search of vindication. Once he arrives, he is shocked to discover Gwen has a new name, Ardis Coleman, and is living with her lesbian lover, Carly, and their daughter,Natalie. Deciding to confront his ex-wife, Matt shows up at her home only to find a bloodstained hallway-and no sign of Ardis or Natalie. Together Carly and Matt form an unlikely alliance in their search for the missing pair. But as they dig into Ardis' life, they discover a twisted plan-one that leads to a final confrontation that may prove fatal to all of them.
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Customer Reviews
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can't put it down
Rating  (5)
Date: 2005-08-16
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
I'll fully engrosed with this mystery. Can't wait to see how it ends.
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Not a great start
Rating  (2)
Date: 2005-01-28
This is my first Muller book and it was not a great start. I was engaged at first and read rapidly making mental notes of the characters and locales so I could absorb the details and emerse myself in the story. Halfway through the book it occurred to me that things were not coming together. The secondary characters never moved to the forefront. But most disappointing was the ending. The book just stopped. There was not a final wrap-up where the police and the surviving characters reflect on the past or project the future. This is not a spoiler, but be aware that it is never explained why Ardis acted like she does. She has no personality beyond the way Carly, her lesbian partner, and Matt, her ex-husband, see her. Even her daughter has remarkably little to say about her. The book would have been so much better if the focus had been the complex Gwen/Ardis and included her thoughts and point of view. Why was she so restless and uncomfortable to the point that she rearranged the lives of other people? What made Ardis so endearing that others wanted to protect and keep her - except her parents? Was it her sexual orientation, her sexual confusion, or, as I suspect, did sex have nothing to do with it?
What was the deal with the mayor and the developer about the gold? That subplot was never fully developed and not resolved, and in the end the fate of the property was not discussed. It made no sense and added nothing to the story, although it could it could have if done differently. What was the point of the focus on the gay couple? I thought the book was going to be about gays and pro-gay life, but I got little insight into the lives of rich gay couples and their children. Whatever sensitivity the character Ardis brought to her articles about gays was certainly missing from Muller's book.
In conclusion, I would have to say that this book was like the character Matt, spying on Ardis and Carly through the lens of his camemra. We saw bits and pieces of various characters lives, stepped in and then out, but without knowledge and understanding. Hollow observation. Shallow read. Provocative only if you have a vivid imagination.
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This is a remarkable novel of true lives and complexities
Rating  (4)
Date: 2004-10-24
greed, corruption, hate and murder take a back seat to the true lives and the complexities of people who enter into troubled relationships.
After fourteen years, Matthew Lindstrom, accused in the beginning of the book in the disappearance and possible murder of his wife Gwen, receives an anonymous phone call in British Columbia, where he's been running a fishing business and ignoring the photography career he once loved.
On Gwen's trail in Soledad County, California, he takes up the camera once again as a photographer under an assumed name for the SOLEDAD SPECTRUM, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper run by hard-nosed former "lesbian prom queen" and former social outcast Carly McGuire, in the city of Cyanide Wells, an apt metaphor for the poison that infects Matt and Carly's lives. That poison takes shape in Carly's life-mate Ardis Coleman, or more accurately, Gwen Lindstrom, whose lesbian nature presumably led her to run from Matt after he pressured her to have children. The irony: Ardis has supposedly given birth to a daughter, Natalie, after an affair that betrayed Carly...and Ardis has stolen Natalie, forcing Matt and Carly to join forces and find the woman they yearn to confront. Marcia Muller peels away the layers of the onion to give us a tale of complexity, subtlety and depth.
My one complaint is that Carly pretty much takes over, leaving us to wonder about Matt, who we care about equally, even a little bit more.
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Character-driven mystery
Rating (4)
Date: 2003-12-30
6 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
Character-based. Does that make it `literature,' by definition? Perhaps. Marcia Muller is one or our more artistic and literate mystery writers, and this is a good one. It deals with an identity puzzle. Matthew's wife appears to have been murdered, but no body is found; because suspicion focuses on him, he hits the trail and makes a new life for himself in a different country. Then his `wife' calls, he travels to seek closure with her, and finds she's gone missing again, this time from the home she shares with her lesbian lover, Carly. She and Matt join forces to find this mystery woman, and...well, read the book yourself.
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The Case of the Missing....something
Rating (2)
Date: 2003-11-17
5 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
Muller has long been acknowledged as the mother the female hardboiled private eye subgenre, and when one has created and nutured as character as fleshed out and "alive" as Sharon McCone, it is disappointing when a stand alone book contains characters as unfleshed out, and even cartoonish as the people who populate "Cyanide Wells." She has created two potentially likeable characters in Matt and Carly, who team up to find what is up with the woman who both has loved...at considerable cost. When the truth about the missing woman is revealed, the reader is left with the feeling that the fatal flaw in each of the protagonists is they are truly lousy judges of character.Muller returns to the North Coast of California, the fictional Soledad County, which in "Point Deception" stood in for the mismatched twins, Mendicino and Fort Bragg. She has captured a lot of the local color of those very different towns, yet even so, never conveys the outsider-local culture clash which has been a part of the area since I began to regularly visit there, which is for about thirty years. Still, it is clear that Muller knows the area very well, and that's fine.... However, the story just isn't a story. It is an outline, a few character sketches, and a concept, about as developed as the book the missing woman is supposedly writing. Also, from the various descriptions of gay culture in the area, I get the feeling this book was started 10 or so years ago, and was shelved and updated...by just changing the dates. Admittedly, my opinion of this book has been colored by the awesomely horrible reading of this book, as released by Brilliance Audio....which utterly ruined by the vocal talents of "Sandra Burr" who sounds like a narrator who specializes in children's voices, and given over to handle Carly's point of view. I don't know where you come from, but in Mendocino, not too many lesbian newspaper owners sound like Rocky the Flying Squirrel! J. Charles, who does the man's part of book is okay. Please, Marcia...do whatever you can to save your books from the clutches of Brilliance. They have one good narrator, Dick Hill...and if he isn't assigned to your book...you are fresh out of luck. And when Sandra Burr is assigned to direct as well as provide the voices....well...think of it as a learning experience.
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