Trigger warning for child murder.
Everyone has an opinion about Ruth Malone. A lot of women loathe her for her beauty and flirtatiousness. A few women look up to her as a model of confidence and independence. Most men lust after her. A few want to punish her for the way she refuses to be what they think of as a good wife and mother. And in Emma Flint’s chilling novel, Little Deaths, those would-be punishers finally have their chance.
Ruth herself is a bit of an enigma; even she isn’t quite sure who she is and what she wants. As Little Deaths opens, she’s a separated wife and the mother of two young children. Her work as a cocktail waitress keeps at least some food in the fridge and offers opportunities for her to feel desired by men on her own terms. But then, one terrible summer day in 1965, her children disappear. Ruth calls her husband, Frank, in a panic and then the police to help search for the children. The detective who arrives, Charlie Devlin, quickly reveals himself to be one of the men who can’t stand Ruth. He sneers at the empty liquor bottles around the apartment. His disdain turns to outright hatred when one of the responding officers finds a valise full of love letters from a lot of men who aren’t Frank Malone.
As Devlin starts to build a case that Ruth did something to her own children, cub reporter Pete Wonicke steals the lead from his fellow journalists and dives into the mystery. Unlike Devlin, Pete is instantly captured by Ruth. I found both men, Devlin and Pete, to be repellant. My antipathy to Devlin comes from his refusal to look into any other possible suspect after the two children are found dead. My dislike of Pete is more complicated. Although I appreciate his willingness to find out what really happened to the Malone kids, I was disappointed in his motives. At first, Pete just wants a splashy story. I can’t really fault him for that except that it makes my sense of information ethics cringe. But as Pete becomes more caught up in his crusade to prove her innocence, I got frustrated at the way he created an idea of Ruth to worship. Pete has no idea who the real Ruth is. He only manages to actually talk to Ruth a couple of times. Everything else is pure imagination and lust.
Little Deaths is an odd mystery. It doesn’t follow any of the trajectories I’m used to. Mystery fans will be pleased to know that we do eventually find out what happened to the Malone children and who did it. I thought the ending was rushed after so many chapters devoted to Pete pounding shoe leather as he talks to people who know (or think they know) Ruth, puzzles over the scant physical evidence, and tries to poke holes in Devlin’s official story. I was also a little frustrated that we only got a few glimpses of Ruth’s own psychological conflicts. That said, I appreciated that Little Deaths surprised me. This book also gave me a lot of food for thought about how our society rushes to judgment based on little more than first impressions. When first impressions get twisted up in law enforcement and the justice system, facts and lies become equally entangled. The consequences of that entanglement can be devastating.
When I read your post, I was reminded of the Alice Crimmins true crime case, where the mother had a bad reputation and the 2 kids disappeared. Is it an inspiration to this novel? My library has the Crimmins case on their true crime shelf, but I must say it was so badly written that I just perused it.
It is! Alison Flood at The Guardian starts her review of Little Deaths by talking about how Crimmins’s case inspired Flint.