Review by Marcia Darnell
Fiction – October 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Woman Who Found Grace
by Bett Reece Johnson
Published in 2003 by Cleis Press, San Francisco
ISBN: 1-57344-150-3
ARE THERE REALLY any coincidences? Is anything ever an accident? Are there truly any secrets?
Cordelia Morgan is back or, I should say, she never left. The Woman Who Found Grace picks up right after Cord’s escape from Colorado in The Woman Who Rode to the Moon. This third novel in Johnson’s dark mystery series takes Cord to a small town in California, where a propitious earthquake leads her to meet Grace, a woman with a big problem.
Grace spent 35 years imprisoned in a mental facility (barring the time she spent out during her many inventive escapes) for a gruesome and infamous double murder. Incarcerated at 21, Grace is finally free and has changed her name and settled into a little town to try to find some peace in her life. Like the protagonists in Johnson’s previous novels, she’s a woman in hiding.
But someone in town knows who Grace is and has been leaving her notes which have escalated from sweet-nothing nursery rhymes to vicious death threats. Now her only friend, the woman who believed in her innocence and sanity, has been killed and Grace is desperate.
She’s also in trouble since, as it turns out, everybody in the burg actually knew her identity all along and they now suspect her of killing their local star journalist.
Cordelia is hiding too, but also on the run. She left her position as a research assistant for a shadowy outfit called The Company, but it’s the kind of job you don’t quit. Now she’s running for her life from Cruz, her former lover and co-worker, on whom she has a secret that could cost his life. Cord is also trying to solve another mystery, the secret to the FBI’s attack on a commune in which her mother died.
Johnson’s novels are dark, with deep philosophy and quick action melding into the mysterious. Every situation is a reflection on the universe, every person a potential threat. However, her flair for twists in the language (“caught between a rock and a hard ass”) and puns (“Crack and Cleavage Lingerie Shoppe”) lighten the mood and make the books a fast read without losing their intensity.
Johnson, formerly of Saguache County, now lives near Ojo Caliente, N.M. The settings for her works — New Mexico, Colorado, California — are rugged and isolated, much like her main characters.
Technology, particularly the Internet, also plays a large part in all three books, showing that while we’re linked to the big, bad, world, it is also inescapably tied to us. And the only secrets we have are those we keep from ourselves.
— Marcia Darnell
A Glimpse Inside the Book
He pushed open the interior door, standing aside for me to enter.
I shot him a glance. He gazed back with the serenity of a fawn. I looked into the dim interior, then back at the stark terrain. No one on the planet knew my whereabouts. I reminded myself of my long history of gullibility. I reminded myself that I didn’t know this guy. I reminded myself that my best friend was dead, and I’d come here looking for her killer.
And then, what the hell, I walked in.
— from The Woman Who Found Grace
