The Dollmaker's Daughters: A Bo Bradley Mystery

It is page turner, in a way, indeed. The main interest is that the author has had a long and direct experience of the type of people she is dealing with : the children and their parents that are taken care of by the Child Protective Services of San Diego, California. She takes us into a three generation situation that has led and leads to criminal activities, murders, multiple murders that are all committed within the family circle by one member of it. The elimination game that the murderer plays leads us to the murderer as the only survivor. But we have to understand how it happened and why it all took place. And that is the difficult part. To disentangle this situation the author explores all the actors around the case, all the CPS social workers, the police and the doctors and psychiatrists, the foster families and the service they depend on, etc. This leads to a characterization of these actors. The foster family in question lives on fear : the fear that the child may turn psychic and dangerous because they do not understand what is happening. So they try to protect themselves. The police, or rather one policeman, retired but still working in the shadow of the FBI, is obsessed by his own hypothesis and tries to run it to the end of the line where it does not stick anymore when his supposed murderer is assassinated in his turn. So he is obliged to revise his view and then jumps to the right solution, in time to save two CPS agents. The CPS supervisor had gotten entangled in the case through a short love affair with one of the protagonists thirteen years earlier. So she appears split between her administrative being that makes her protect herself even to the cost of having one victim punished if not destroyed, and yet, deep under, she is a very sensitive and caring woman. Her dilemma. The doctors and psychiatrists really try to help, and yet their opinion has no weight when an administrative service or a court is at stake. But the principal characteristic of the book is that the main character, Bo Bradley, is herself a manic depressive person who has difficulties establishing balanced relationships with others and to acceopt a shared love life. She is always trying to defend herself from other people, isolating herself in so doing, locking herself up onto herself and using medications to keep herself in line. You add to that two teenagers, one the main victim, and the other a could-be victim if she wasn't helped by an uncle, and you have the whole picture. Gothic in a quite new meaning : « What ends when the symbols shatter ? » The totally disillusioned ideology of a whole generation that witnesses the end of a social order and its beliefs and sees no new perspective. They become blasé, but they could easily get into drugs, violence, criminal activities or even state-sanctified warfare violence to retain some sense of providence or fate or historical justification. A disquieting thriller that forces us to question some fundamentals in our own v

I enjoy Abigail Padgett's books so much that I buy them in hardback. That's the highest accolade I can give a book, since money is the thing hardest to part with, for starving artists.When I was a child, I listened to "The Shadow" on the radio, and Orson Welles' rap about knowing "the evil that lurks in the hearts of men..." marked me for life. Well, not only the Shadow knows, but also Padgett and her protagonists.Men will not like her books; honest women will. Witty, insightful, entertaining, telling a gripping story.

This book was wonderful. It was unpredictable with no clear-cut villain. It's very inspiring to have a competent heroine with manic-depression, or any mental illness for that matter. It adds a whole new dimension to the story and an unusual one at that for a detective story. The characters are all complex and well-written. This book, like Padgett's other Bo Bradley novels, are wonderfully written and lovely to read. I have read this book over and over again and pick up new nuances each time.

Abigail Padgett is my numero uno favorite mystery writer. My choice is based on her characters (I feel that I know Bo Bradley better than some friends). superb plotting, and excellence in her way of telling the story. "The Dollmaker's Daughter" is a page-turner spiced with some wonderful comments on bureaucrats. I laughed at Bo Bradley's spunky handling of her officious boss, and I kept turning the pages to find out "Who is Janny?" and "Who is trying to hurt Janny", and "Will life work out for this lovable girl?"

This book doesn't follow the usual paths of detective fiction. At first, the reader isn't even sure what type of case it will be, burt in the end it all fits together in an exciting and difficult to guess manne