1月
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Retirement Plan
What do you do when you fall through the loopholes in the system and all you have to rely on are your own wits?
Lois and Sophie have scrambled and saved for years, planning for their retirement in Florida. But now they’ve lost it all, and Lois’s sniper training from her long-ago service as an Army nurse leads to a desperate career choice.
When Detective Morgan Holiday is assigned to investigate a spate of sniper killings, it’s just one more stress point in her already overb
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I HAVE A RETIREMENT PLAN .. HUNTING ! funny decal | US $3.79 End Date: Saturday Feb-25-2012 18:00:37 PST Buy It Now for only: US $3.79 Buy it now | Add to watch list |
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Real Justice in the Modern World,
This is a very winning story. These characters are all individual unique folks, struggling to get by in a real world we can all recognize. There are true bad guys who draw no sympathy, but they too are realistic. They exist in the world we live in. The way the author balances her characters’ morality is really a remarkable dance.
I loved this book. These nice old ladies who happen to be a lesbian couple figure out the only way to a reasonable retirement is through a serious criminal enterprise: killing people for a fee. Being not really criminal, they try to find and accept only jobs in which the intended victim has it coming. In this they are more closely related to the vigilante justice of the old west then to the actions of crime family hitmen. Although they are doing it for money, the reader understands that they wouldn’t kill someone who was an innocent.
When I started reading this book I was torn by the morality of what they intended to do. Initially it is presented as somewhat comic in nature. The novel has a conversational style, beautifully handled, that moves things along. The characters are all of them pretty much individuals, with no cardboard minor figures sitting like props along the way. The two old ladies are distinct, nearly an odd couple. Their back stories are reasonable and winning. Their adopted daughter’s story is also well told and functions as an armature for the story. As the story unfolded I became more than just comfortable with the moral force behind these women. There is a sense of justice and a recognizing of the danger of ad hoc judgment in every action undertaken. It’s really a tour de force look at what real justice should be in this modern world.
Contrasting the women’s lives as aging gays in our culture, the young policewoman’s story shows us the problems on the other end. The fact of her gayness eludes her, though the desire rises up. Her problems with her mother and her mother’s loss of memory are also keys to the way this story must play out.
I liked these women. I liked the cops– the young black woman and her old partner and her new partner. I liked the lesbian couple’s daughter, and felt bad for her. I had sympathy for those forced to hire these women. And I felt that frisson of grief that comes from justice being served.
I am familiar with Miller’s other crime drama books, Nine Nights on the Windy Tree and Dispatch to Death. This new story, Retirement Plan, is her best work. She just gets better and better. I’m looking forward to what comes next.
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|intelligent and entertaining procedural,
An intriguing and engrossing read. Lois Burnett and Sophie Long, two senior lesbians, decide to supplement their meager retirement income with some contract killings. With this premise, I was actually expecting a screwball comedy, but it turns out this is more of a crime/police procedural. There is humor, to be sure, much of it supplied by Myrtle, a friend of Lois and Sophie’s, who is looking for love and trying on new partners like changing clothes in a fitting room.
The killings, however, are handled in a serious manner. The story essentially follows two different threads, that of the hit women and of detective Morgan Holiday as she tries to solve the killings, the two paths leading inevitably to an eventual intersection.
Lois and Sophie struggle not only with their shootings, but family and neighbor problems as well.
Homicide detective Morgan Holiday, meanwhile struggles with problems of her own–her fluctuating weight, her own sexuality and a mother with Alzheimer’s who rarely recognizes her and has a penchant for escaping from her nursing home. The humor in these segments is grim.
I had problems with a couple of points, foremost among them it seemed that the two leads choose their retirement career somewhat blithely. I had to suspend disbelief on that score, but no more so than I would have done with, say, a fantasy novel, where I just have to accept the author’s premise that dragons are real. And I thought Lois and Sophie were a little quick on the trigger, so to speak. True, a couple of their hits were undeniable scumbags and there’s little reason for anyone to regret their demise, but some others were not quite so clearly delineated. It helps here that the Lois and Sophie are well drawn and sympathetic, so that the reader can easily care about them and root for them, even if not always agreeing with their judgments. After all, how often in life do we agree with everything our friends decide?
Despite my quibbles, I found this a well written novel, with believable and likable characters and some not so likable, and plenty of suspense, not of the whodunit style but rather of the will-they-get-away-with-it sort, the answer to which I’m not going to supply here. And while ostensibly a lesbian novel, its appeal is broader than that. The issues with which the characters grapple are, after all, universal ones–the plight of seniors in today’s society, the search for love and acceptance, the failings of the legal system in protecting the innocent from the predators. One hardly needs to be lesbian to recognize these issues, or share in the struggle with them.
All in all, highly recommended.
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