Review by Marcia Darnell
Fiction – March 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Woman Who Knew Too Much
Published in 1998
by Cleis Press San Francisco
by Bett Reece Johnson
ISBN: 1-57344-045-0
and
The Woman Who Rode to the Moon
Published in 1999 by Cleis Press
by Bett Reece Johnson
San Francisco
ISBN: 1-57344-086-8
I READ A LOT OF MYSTERIES. I spent countless hours of my childhood with Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, and Perry Mason. The advent of female detectives in the early ’80s was a wonderful gift, introducing me to Kinney Milihone and V.l. Warshawski. Sharon McCone became a friend, and I also fritter away hours of my life with Jenny Cain and Goldy Bear Schultz. If I’m not a gourmet of mysteries, l am at least a glutton of them.
The mystery series begun by Bett Johnson with The Woman Who Knew Too Much is as good as those on the bestseller lists. Better, in some ways. It offers a rare combination in popular fiction; this woman can write and plot.
Cordelia Morgan, the continuing character in the series, is a figure so shadowy that details of her life are not revealed until almost two-thirds of the way through the first book. She’s a research specialist cum assassin for a firm called The Company. A strong, intellectually gifted woman in her mid-40s, Cord is so adept at changing identities that her very persona shifts with each disguise. One constant is the adversarial relationship with her former lover, Cruz. Every time Cord leaves him, she steals his car. Now he’s trying to kill her.
Cord’s voice is seldom heard in the novels, but is so strong as to be hypnotic.
The primary narrator in each book is a woman who lives where the book’s action takes place. In The Woman Who Knew Too Much, it’s Jet Butler. Jet is hiding out in northern New Mexico, mostly from herself — her past includes a national tragedy she believes was her fault. She’s changed her name and her line of work, but the murder of another eccentric hideaway makes her examine her chosen home and the personalities (including all of her own) that inhabit it.
The second in the series, The Woman Who Rode to the Moon, focuses on J.S. Symkin, who’s running from a personal betrayal into the life of Greta Garbo. Sym made a ton of money in real estate for the express purpose of supporting her self-imposed exile. Her retreat, a hated community near Aspen, is disrupted immediately by a murder, a suicide, and other evils. Johnson’s characters, primary and peripheral, are strong-willed people who know, or think they know, what they want. Most have voluntarily withdrawn from city life, many conceal the reasons from themselves and everyone else. Cordelia’s appearance in the other women’s lives makes them take stock of what they’re doing — and not doing — with their talents. Johnson’s skillful words draw the reader into similar self-reflection.
These books are disturbing, as good literature is — they force the reader to look hard at her own choices and examine the personalities she hides from others and herself. The books are a worthwhile read, and not just for entertainment.
If you like mysteries, read this series. If you love philosophical literature, read these works. Just be prepared to be unsettled by what you find therein.
Johnson, who lives in the San Luis Valley, is a former college teacher who quit to write fiction. The third book in the series is set for publication in October.
… while I have not looked directly on evil, l have lived with it and slept with it and can recognize its coming by the stench and rhythm of its breath before it arrives. I have tracked it, touched its sleeve in dark theaters, held it in my sights and known a hundred times that its single most effective defense is not modern weaponry nor a brilliant mind. I will disappoint you when I say: evil’s most potent weapon is merely the vacuous plainness of its face, unremarkable as a sock and common as a nail. Anonymity is the only priceless commodity whose worth is not measured by its deficit.
–The Woman Who Rode to the Moon
