Brewing Up a Storm by Emma Lathen
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
This 1996 mystery is the second to the last of 23 novels starring Wall Street banker John Putnam Thatcher. In a tribute to common sense, the amateur sleuth thinks through the facts to identify who murdered an activist. Readers who enjoy clues presented in the classic “fair play” whodunnit will like this one.
After her divorce and with nothing to do, empty nester Madelaine Underwood founded NOBBY, No Beer Buying Youngsters. Its mission is to combat alcohol use by teenagers. It’s campaigning against Quax, a nonalcoholic beer sold on the Coke and Pepsi shelves. NOBBY claims drinking Quax will lead kids to drinking Kix, the real beer made by the same brewer.
Mrs. Underwood is a narcissist who feels entitled to center stage and has never worked in the ranks of an organization in her life. Messes she creates are for the little people to clean up. Lathen spends about a third of the book leading up to the crime, which may put out mystery fans like me who prefer the corpus delicti in chapter one. But I found the context entertaining and instructive. For instance, Lathen is plausible contrasting the true believers who volunteer in the advocacy group and the clear-eyed professionals that make it run smoothly.
Lathen was the pen name of a female writing team of an attorney and an economist. She had a bead on how people think and act, not just titans of Wall Street but also middle managers, technocrats, clerical staff and volunteers in grassroots organizations who are sincerely concerned about things like gateway beverages affecting themselves or their kids. The overall tone is taken from her series hero banker sleuth John Putnam Thatcher – that is, curious, discerning, bemused, and tolerant.
Written in the late 1990s, are these books dated? Sure, she knew the business world of her era and with three recessions since the early 2000s our landscape now is very different. But we can still enjoy the white-collar detective Thatcher and Lathen’s insights into organizational behavior, managerial style, and the psychology of anxiety, ambition, and conceit. Intelligent, literate, fun, highly recommended.
