After Nurse Agnes met Jim Mahoney, the
tiny island where she worked became enchanted. The big Irish detective was
tracing down a dangerous criminal, but he still had time to fall in love.
However, Agnes was troubled. Their romance would go out with the tide if she
concealed evidence from the headstrong young deputy. And her patient would die
if he learned his own son was a suspect.
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“Oh, why
couldn’t he be just an ordinary deputy sheriff, out risking his life on murders
and riots?”
“So much for
girls who ran after men. Unless they had a legitimate reason for calling, they
got further ahead by waiting.”
“If she could
only somehow psychologize Jim into letting her help.”
“He’s in the
café with that cute little number he’s been shining up to.”
“What man
could stand having a woman, not even in his profession, win out over him?”
REVIEW:
Regular
readers may recall that I have no fondness for Jeanne Bowman, who in my view is
more unpleasant than a heaping plate of Brussels sprouts. This book is not her worst,
but her trademark pedantic pop psychology is well-represented in these pages,
so it’s still not worth the trouble. But since I did in fact brave the storm,
here is my report from the front:
Nurse Agnes
(yes, Agnes) Leahy is a nurse who owns a small house somewhere in the San
Francisco Bay Area. The geography is a bit confusing, and I never quite figured
out if she actually lives on Polka Dot Island or somewhere else. But she is
working there, caring for a Mr. Mason who has no first name and is recovering
from a major car accident that killed his wife. As the book opens, Agnes and
Mr. Mason’s son Ted, age 19, are plotting how to keep away the well-wishing
hordes who will descend on the patient and wear him out. They settle on—and
actually install—an electrified cattle guard at the end of the driveway to zap
any friends who might come visiting, and I am not kidding.
Someone on
the island is running around setting fires, and suspicion quickly settles on
young Ted, who always seems to be near at hand when the blazes start—in fact,
at one point he burns his arms attempting to put out the blaze, or so he says. His
father alludes to the new return of a problem Ted had when he was younger; Agnes
fears that it’s playing with matches, but somehow just cannot bring herself,
through 80 pages, to ask Mr. Mason exactly what he’s referring to. As she is
nursing the chief suspect’s father, Agnes soon meets Detective Jim Mahoney, who
is borderline pathological about pyromaniacs, stemming from the fact that his
family farm was burned by one when he was an impressionable lad, and the
ensuing financial ruin is thought to have brought on his father’s fatal heart attack. This gives
Agnes and Jim plenty of opportunity to spout platitudes about criminals and
victims, such as, “With fire, no insurance can cover the loss of a man’s faith
in himself and his ability to care for his family. Not if it is set by a pyro.”
And these beauties sprout like dandelions on virtually every page.
Dating a
detective who chases pyromaniacs can be tricky, however; Agnes at one point has
to throw out the flowers she’d set on the table and change her dress because
both are orange, “a tone of flame. She wanted nothing to remind him of his
work.” Not that it matters; it’s all he talks of. We therefore spend a lot of
time discussing the motivations and psychoses and behaviors of pyromaniacs; I
am sorry to report they are not very interesting.
The pyro
continues to light blazes unchecked, despite all of Jim’s obsessive police work,
and eventually Jim asks Agnes to give up her job caring for Mr. Mason because
the island’s too dangerous. She declines, and Jim gets angry: “You’d rather I
worried myself into a frazzle than let some other nurse tie up that case,” he
says, and Agnes, getting ridiculously ahead of herself, despairs that their yet-to-occur marriage will end in divorce:
“This disagreement meant there was some profound difference between them; one
that could swiftly wreck their marriage unless one or the other was willing to
give up his integrity.” It’s a very long reach, but this sort of psychobabbling
leap is not uncommon for Bowman. So to save their possibly forthcoming marriage,
Agnes sets out to figure out who the pyro actually is, since the detective with
the might of the police force and years of experience backing him can’t seem to
manage it. But if Jim can’t even handle her working on the island, I can’t believe
that Agnes’s success in tracking down the criminal would do anything but
utterly doom their relationship.
In the end,
though, the days we spend following her around on her mystery-shrouded sleuthing
vacation come to naught when her own house is targeted—and we saw this coming
since about page 3—and she finds the perpetrator dancing with glee in the
bushes, just seconds before Jim appears on the scene to do the same. The
inconvenient fact that she figured out who the guilty party was well before he
did is conveniently swept under the rug, and all that’s left for her to do is
get married, which she does with nauseating drama on the last page.
Jeanne Bowman
was, unfortunately for us, a prolific writer. Nurse on Polka Dot Island is not her most egregious offense, but
now that it’s done, there’s one less for us to wade through.
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