Poor little rich girl mystery

>> Dying Voices offers intrigue despite some cliches

by JULIET WATERS

Heiress Dorothy "Dodie" Blackstock, narrator of Dying Voices, hates Miss Marple novels. "If I was a character in one of those books, I'd kill her and then I'd say 'Now solve that you old bag.'" Problem is, she pretty much is a character from an Agatha Christie novel, though more like Miss Marple crossed with an Elvis Costello song.

Twenty-one years ago, when her ex-supermodel mother, Susan, was kidnapped, Dodie spent a summer watching the detectives. She even developed a crush on one, and made a birthday card on which she drew a picture of him with his bugging equipment. Because her father, billionaire Wolfgang Blackstock, wouldn't pay the 10-million-pound ransom, negotiations went on for months. Finally, the kidnappers were found; one was killed in a shoot-out, one was arrested and one escaped, taking Dodie's mother. The two were never found.

Until now. Dodie is 29 and Susan Blackstock's body has just turned up. She's been dead for two days. Preliminary investigations and an autopsy show that she has spent her last years as a homeless junkie. The same day, Dodie's surrogate mother, Joan, her father's ex-wife from a previous marriage, dies of a heart attack when she is scared by a burglar.

In most mystery novels this would obviously be no coincidence. Yet one accepts the randomness of the events for several reasons. Dodie is an interesting enough character in her own right that the mystery plot plays second fiddle to her poor-little-rich-girl story. Her family life has been so unusual that one readily accepts bizarre occurrences. And she's actually got other stuff on her mind.

Dodie grew up in a household of women including her mother, her father's ex-wife and his mistress, Angela. A distant, cruel and surprisingly sexless man, Wolf Blackstock just liked having women dependent on him. For years after Dodie walked out, he secretly put money into her bank account. So incompetent at the ordinary tasks of managing money, Dodie had no idea she wasn't "making it on her own" at her low-paying job until she overheard some co-workers talking about checking their bank statements.

While it would be nice to say she gave the money back or never touched it, the truth is Dodie doesn't have the survival skills or self-esteem to suddenly strike out on her own. It is years before she weans herself off it. Then, just as she finally achieves financial independence, her father dies.

Now that Joan is dead, Dodie is going to inherit her father's billion-dollar empire, money she has no interest in. Her father died with so many assets that even the job of getting rid of the money will be a full-time career. Dodie wants desperately to be the thing that most people flee from: an average anonymous working person with low self-esteem. But life conspires against her.

The greatest strength of Dying Voices is the sense of emptiness and suffocating inevitability that Laura Wilson creates for the wealthy women in her second novel. Here are characters not motivated by a desperation to obtain money, but by a desperation to escape it. In a standard scary sub-plot, Dodie starts receiving letters from the escaped kidnapper, who claims that he killed her mother and is now after her. But being stalked by an insane killer seems mild compared to the psychological prison of class that Dodie and her mother both try to escape in different ways.

The weakness of the novel is in the clichéd plot twists. A strangled cat, a killer hiding in the bathroom etc. But in a weird way the very predictability of the plot throws into relief the truly interesting elements of the crime. Who murdered Susan Blackstock is far less interesting than the slow death of her soul at the hands of a husband whose ego is as weak as his empire is strong. And how Dodie evades her mother's fate simply by achieving an average life, is actually more interesting than how she solves the crime. :

Dying Voices by Laura Wilson. Orion, pb, 260pp, $18.99