Joe's Reviews > Till the Cows Come Home

My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women in peril'' thrillers to focus on ladies who are amateur sleuths. Till the Cows Come Home is my introduction to author Judy Clemens and her series featuring Stella Crown. Published in 2011, I abandoned this at the 20% mark (six chapters) and that was with healthy skimming. This breezy rural mystery is one of the ten worst books I've read since joining Goodreads in 2014. It's bad. Howlingly bad. Ready to give it a pass if an eighth grader wrote it bad.

Whenever I quit a book, I accept some responsibility for not properly vetting it. There is material that receives rave reviews that I am not the demographic for. With Till the Cows Come Home, I confirmed that this was not a cozy mystery and in fact, was regarded by some as a pig pen of human toil. The plot involves a young, single farmer in Pennsylvania named Stella Crown who begins to suspect that the illness which killed a neighbor was no accident and the death of some of her livestock is not natural either. She investigates. Could this be Smilla's Sense of Snow in a cornfield? It doesn't seem cozy to me.

I'm not going to make any cow shit jokes here but the writing in this novel is terrible. It's a first person account and Stella comes to the page very, very casual and commonplace. I get that she doesn't practice international law. She's introduced birthing a calf, but rather than thinking or speaking like a hard working woman who knows more about animal husbandry or weather than I ever will, Stella expresses herself like she was raised on daytime TV and can't turn away from The Maury Povich Show to articulate a thought that isn't expressed on television daily.

I heard the door of Howie's apartment close, and I watched as he descended his stairs. By the look on his face, he was still tickled at me. Oh well. Life would go on.

Without exchanging so much as a syllable, we climbed into my truck and drove the quarter mile to the Derstines' house. I parked to the side of the lane so I wouldn't block anybody, then paused to look at the small group on the porch.

"Ready?" I asked.

Howie grunted and opened the door.

The walk up the lane was too short, and I soon found myself giving Claire Derstine, Toby's mother, a hug. She held on for a long time, and I tried not to feel claustrophobic.

"I'm really sorry," I said when she let go.

There's a lot of wasted ink on the page, lots of repetition. Characters are incessantly thanking and apologizing. "Thanks" and "sorry" don't show up on every page, but enough to stand out. There are a lot of pleasantries or pedestrian dialogue that could easily be cut. Clemens might be trying to mimic a real conversation, maybe, but then hits my greatest raw nerve in fiction by having characters refer to each other by name, constantly, which sober human beings never do. "I didn't see where the cow went, Howie, did you?" "I sure didn't, Stella. Maybe Ma knows." Barf.

The title is awful. The main character's name doesn't fit her ("Stella Crown" lands pretty urban or even cosmopolitan on my ears, like Stella Du'Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire or Thomas Crown in The Thomas Crown Affair). And this surprised me, but I did not like the author conveying how vile the local land speculator is by joking that he only likes Republicans. Using a political party, any political party, to characterize someone is so lazy. There are ways to convey that your bad guy is a psychotic individualist with fascist sympathies without calling out their political party. It's poor marketing--alienating half your readers--but worse it's just bad writing.

While reading, as brief as it was, I imagined Mackenzie Davis playing Stella Crown. It'd be a long way down from Black Mirror: San Junipero, Halt and Catch Fire and Station Eleven to this material. I'd change everything in the book except the main character's occupation and the name of her dog, and maybe the fact that she rides a Harley Davidson.