Marilyn's Mystery Reads

When a series featuring a favorite character ends, it’s a sad time for readers who have followed the protagonist through several novels.  It becomes truly sad when it turns out that it’s the author’s last book.  When I read The Tree of Light and Flowers featuring Jane Whitefield, which was published shortly after Thomas Perry died in September, I felt as if I had lost two friends, not just one.

Over a thirty-one year period, Perry published ten books that tell Jane’s story as a runner.  She is a member of the Wolf Clan, Seneca Tribe, and as such has absorbed the knowledge of her ancestors and their ways of making people “disappear.”  For Jane, this means that when she is approached by an innocent person who is being stalked and in danger of being killed, she must find a way to invent a new persona for that individual and help them leave their old life and begin a new one.

Jane’s own life is now more complicated than it was when she began aiding people.  She’s married with an infant daughter, and she’s basically promised her husband Carey that she is done with her dangerous previous life.  But somehow people in need of her assistance always locate her.

A young Seneca woman, Clare Markham, has come from Oklahoma to find Jane.  She is running from the police, fleeing a charge of murder.  She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed her attacker with his own knife, but before he died he told the authorities that she had propositioned him and that is what they believe.  Because she had heard of Jane from her grandmother, she took a very circuitous route via a series of busses and made her way to Buffalo, New York, Jane’s home.

Jane is drawn to Clare, gives her the name Katie Barnes, and takes her home to act as nanny for baby May until she can decide on a permanent solution.  That works out well and probably would have eased the way for Jane to make Katie a person with a complete set of papers to prove her identity but for one additional problem.  A group of Russian agents whom Jane had outwitted four years earlier has just discovered that, contrary to what they believed, she is still alive, and thus they have returned to the United States to kill her.

Part of the enjoyment in reading Jane Whitefield novels is following the intricate planning that she must do to make certain that anyone who comes to her for help has what they need to become a “new person.”  In Katie’s case, because she is a teenager, she’ll need to enroll in school, have records in her new name from her former (fictitious) school, a new family history, and more in a similar vein.  Jane has done this before, with help from friends but not with a baby and a group of Russian gangsters tracking her down.

Thomas Perry was a gifted writer whose protagonists (not only Jane Whitefield but many others) were believable and realistic.  He left a huge legacy behind him–he will be missed by his many readers.

You can read more about him at various sites on the web.