Review by Mack Hassler
“It is a poetry where the world becomes
writing and language becomes the double
of the world.”
Octavio Paz
I think Terri Martin is a clever and witty writer who comprehends the dynamic link of language to her world, not only as Paz states it in his surrealist epigraph above but also in the famous print of a pipe labeled “this is not a pipe” (Magritte, 1929). Now Martin has produced her second full-length novel, as she calls it “the beginning of the Kat Wilde murder mystery series.” Clearly, an extended fiction that uses a point of view character as narrator, who is deeply involved with the plot as well as with projected and future tales, illustrates the Paz dictum of the link of words to action. Kat is delightfully strange in her voice as she tells her story. The first-person narration by Kat is delayed, however, by an opening and short Prologue that Martin writes, by way of contrast, in standard third-person omniscient narration. A cop is called to one of the side trails East of Peshekee by US 41 in the Houghton-Hancock area of the Copper Country midway between the bottom of the Bay at Baraga and Copper Harbor at the tip of the arching Peninsula. A man and woman seem upset and at odds with one another after an apparent mugging. The couple are definitely not Yoopers. The woman is in high heels and both are complaining about the bugs. The cop may have to write it up as a felony.
Immediately after this Prologue, Kat picks up the storytelling with her summary of who she is. Her Dad is a successful CPA, trained as an accountant at Michigan Tech in Houghton, and they live in a comfortable home overlooking Crystal Lake and near the wilderness area where the “Wildwood Stables” ranch lies. Kat had accepted her Dad’s advice to earn a practical degree in college at Michigan Tech and has worked several years now as a grants writer for the big Marquette Hospital, and she had a “spiffy” little apartment on the Marquette Harbor with a view of Lake Superior. But Kat is tired and bored with that practical work and life and, like many in her generation, has just decided to move back with her parents. But as she muses like many in her generation, the house has filled up since she left for College and will now be crowded and uncomfortable. So far her situation seems just typical of her generation. But her Dad’s brother, her Uncle Phil, has just passed away. Her Uncle was very different from her practical Dad. As a kind of “wildcat” that was attractive to her Dad when he would get away to help out, Phil owned and ran what amounted to a “ranch” in the UP. It was a horse boarding set of buildings and corrals nearby that Uncle Phil seemed to make a go of. Kat’s Dad has the scheme to pass the ranch on to his bored daughter that he will inherit in order to give her an interest and a place during this time of uncertainty and insecurity in her life. Her Dad takes her over to look at the property and to help her make the adjustment now that she has quit her job in Marquette. She is a UP girl trying now to forge her own special way, and she tells a good story about her family and the changes. The reader begins to like her a lot. I think Martin invents the character and the voice of Kat well to engage the reader.
What Kat and her Dad discover in poking around the rather rundown property, gifted them by her Uncle, is as extraordinary as Kat’s own rundown plans. At the front of the novel, Martin sets a Latin motto or epigraph which in its modern translation is perfect for her tale. It is from St Jerome and is one most of us know “Do not look s gift horse in the mouth.” It is nice to see this classical support for what is to follow, and I think the Latin grammar of linking the words that go together by their case endings rather than just by order in the sentence as we do in English gives us a good foundation for the clever changes in point of view that Martin masters in Kat’s narration that follows.
The first big change that Kat and Gary Wilde must deal with as they look this gift ranch in the mouth is the dead body of a woman stuffed in a metal box usually used for oats in the stable, with a bullet in the back of her head. Kat’s practical Dad always says “Call 911” if you discover a dead body—a little different than the summoning of the cop in the book’s Prologue. In any case, Sheriff Ollie Olsen as well as his son Nikko, a new boyfriend of Kat in her change of life, show up at the Wilde Accounting Office back in Peshekee; and the reader learns how to pronounce the strange Yooper word, which is also the name of the County Seat—a long way from the Marquette Harbor that Kat has just left. But there is a great view of Crystal Lake from her Dad’s office on the second floor. p. 20.
Olsen tells them that the dead body is easily identified by a tattoo on the shoulder as Uncle Phil’s hospice nurse. Olsen says she has been missing for several days. But this is not unusual for such a good hospice nurse, who would learn to love her patient or “friend in death’ deeply. But this explanation, which often happens in hospice situations, is intensified when her half-brother shows up soon with evidence to claim that she was also the illegitimate daughter of shy and reclusive Uncle Phil. The dead woman has a Finn-British name “Saari-Somers.” And the reader is reminded of the earlier cop call presented in the Prologue to the story of the non-Yooper angry couple outside Peshekee. The hospice care for Uncle Phil by his daughter is plausible as a National System of care by a very close and loving nurse. In my own experience, I know a bit about the hospice care we have developed for loved ones, and Uncle Phil being cared for at the end of life by his own daughter makes a lot of sense to me.
But Kat Wilde’s plight sours when the right to inherit “the ranch” is challenged by the claims of the half-brother of the dead woman Now Kat and her boyfriend Nikko and her new quarter horse Rusty must resolve these puzzles of what Martin calls “family sins and secrets.” I think the unraveling of the mysteries in Gift Horse is done well by her mode of narration. It is not a simplistic story. We look for many more mysteries in the voice of Kat from Wildwood Stables as Martin continues to create them.
Gift Horse, A Kat Wilde U.P. Mystery, by Terri Martin (Modern History Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2024) 246 pages, pbk, $24.95
