Murder at the Opera: A Capital Crimes Novel (Truman, Margaret, Capital Crimes Series.)
by Margaret Truman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Margaret TrumanEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-30
ISBN: 0345478223
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Murder at the Opera: A Capital Crimes Novel (Truman, Margaret, Capital Crimes Series.)
Book Review: Mediocrity at the Opera
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a very strange book. The late Margaret Truman Daniels was a highly respected author of excellent biographies of both her father and her mother. She had for years been the author of a series of popular mystery novels based on the gimmick of insider knowledge of life in the elite and powerful portions of the District of Columbia.
She had also been the target of rumors to the effect that some or all of her mystery novels had been ghostwritten. To the best of my knowledge, both Ms. Truman and the author commonly identified as the ghost denied that rumor until her dying day. This book has provided me with reason to wonder whether there might be something in that rumor after all.
Margaret Truman first came into focus as a specific individual to me and to the general public when she received an unfavorable review for a vocal recital. Her father, POTUS, himself, Give-'em-hell-Harry, took exception to that review--publicly. Young Miss Truman continued on with her not especially lustrous singing career until her marriage and passage into a fairly rarified sphere of the Establishment.
The book at hand, "Murder at the Opera," is another in the series that features Mac and Annabelle Smith as its ostensible protagonists. In this outing, Mac, who has abandoned his practice as a criminal defense attorney for the dubious pleasures and rewards of the academic life, has been dragooned into the task of serving as an extra--with full explanation as to why "supernumerary" is his correct title--in a production of Puccini's "Tosca" at the Washington National Opera. Mac is quickly shown to be almost completely clueless with regard to opera, so the book takes on the task--in addition to everything else expected from a mystery!--of explaining to Mac and by extension the equally clueless majority of the readers who acquire the book, about opera in general, about "Tosca" in particular and the process by which the whole preposterous / magnificent spectacle is put on stage before an audience.
So far, so good, but things get very strange in the execution. Considering that Margaret Truman had been a professional singer, herself, the portions of the book dealing with opera are astonishingly bland, even namby-pambyish. For example, beyond a casual mention of the widespread terror of colds suffered by singers, there are no "singer-ish" concerns expressed.
Opera fans live by artistic fine-tunings and disputes: this director is a genius, that one is a Eurotrash regietheater barbarian; this tenor is a magnificent star, that one a stumblebum; Wagner (or Verdi or Strauss or Britten) a brilliant figure of eternal greatness, Wagner (or Verdi or Strauss or Britten) a tired old hack who wasn't much on his best day and whose time is long passed. I once saw two fans in the standing room area of the San Francisco Opera come to blows over whether Enrico Caruso or his great predecessor, the barely recorded Jean de Reske, was the better singer! There's none of that in this book: the Washington National Opera is wonderful, "Tosca" is wonderful, the director for this production is wonderful, the (unidentified) singers are wonderful, the understudies are wonderful, the performance is wonderful. Yechh--it's enough to make any real opera fan fearful of falling into sugar shock.
Finally, there is a review of the opening night performance of "Tosca" which is supposedly quoted in its entirety. It praises the WNO, the production and the director but contrives not to say a single word about the singers and singing. That, let me confidently assure you, is not the way it's done--and a former professional singer like Margaret Truman would doggone well have known it.
As for the rest of the book, those two protagonists, Mac and Annabelle have to be among the most arid, vapid, desiccated, and boring characters ever put on paper. The villain-in-chief is less of interest than Mac and Annabelle. And the lesser villains even less than that. Earlier Amazon reviewers have complained about a major plot twist which yanks the book out of the course it had been following for most of its length. They were fully justified in their complaints.
This book is not good. It's not strong enough to be bad. It is a textbook example of mediocrity.
Three stars.
More Murder at the Opera: A Capital Crimes Novel (Truman, Margaret, Capital Crimes Series.) reviews:
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