A NIGHT OWL REVIEWS BOOK REVIEW | Reviewed by: Vee
Botonist Elzada Clover has always wondered what happened to Lowell Dunhill. After noticing a bullet hole in the back of his skull, she knew he'd been murdered. When his body disappears, his death is ruled a suicide. Thirteen years later a skeleton is found in the hull of a colleague's boat. Elzada decides to travel back to help her friend and to investigate the mystery.
While Elzada goes on to question people, much of the story is focused on Mrs. Morris Merkle (Jane), a pretty young woman who'd married an older man. She's visiting her Sister and brother in law for the summer while her husband is staying in St. Louis.
While there, sans her husband, she begins an affair with Euell Wigglesworth, a man a few years her junior. She doesn't seem uncomfortable with her infidelity and oddly her behavior is encouraged by her in-laws.
The two stories intersect, though loosely through common acquaintances. Elzada pieces together what happened to Lowell Dunhill while Jane decides how to conduct herself.
The Butterflies of the Grand Canyon was part mystery, part love story, part personal struggle. Ms. Erhart highlights ordinary characters and their mundane thoughts and conversations in a highly entertaining way.
There is a theme of infidelity that runs throughout while the mystery often takes a back seat. The story wraps up in a very unexpected way.
Jan 29, 2010 | 9780452295490
5 - Rare Top Pick | 4.5 - Top Pick | 4 - I Liked It | 3.5 - Enjoyable | 3 - OK | 2.5 - It just didn't click
Book Blurb for The Butterflies of Grand Canyon
Set against the backdrop of the brooding and sensual canyon, a young woman's heart awakens and a decades-old mystery is solved
When Jane Merkle arrives in the tiny town of Flagstaff, Arizona, with her much older husband on a summer day in 1951, she hasn't any idea that her life is about to change forever. After all, one of Jane's favorite sayings is "When in Rome, remember that you're from St . Louis." But over a summer spent with her sister-in-law, Dotty, and Dotty's lepidopterist husband, Oliver, in a village perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon, Jane discovers her latent ability with a butterfly net and her attraction to a handsome young ranger. Meanwhile, an unidentified skeleton is found on the premises of one of the village's most cantankerous citizens. With the help-and hindrance-of a colorful cast of historical characters, including an eccentric botanist who moonlights as an amateur sleuth, the murder mystery that has haunted the town for years is solved.
In her latest novel, set in the quintessential landscape of the Southwest, Margaret Erhart weaves history, science, and an intimate knowledge of the human heart to tell a fast-paced tale.
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