Violet “West” Shelley, the daughter of a legendary poet, has a few problems. A successful true crime writer, she endures trauma as she interviews and writes about serial killers. She also carries the burden of a mother who committed suicide during her infancy, leaving her in the care of her uncle Lawton, a professor of history.
Violet’s parents – her poetic mother, Juliet Bellwood, and her estranged father, Hugh Shelley, also a writer are an obvious nod to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. (“Inspired by” states the author in an afterword.) It feels rather more than simply an inspiration, but Sarai Walker is such an intelligent and perceptive writer that as the story goes on, we don’t mind a bit.
Much of Furious Violet revolves around the mythical status enveloping the late Juliet Bellwood – including all kinds of merchandizing, various books – a cookbook, and even a kid’s book, (!) scholarly dissections of her work, her marriage, and deep hostility to … her only child.
As a big academic conference, “Juliet Bellwood: The Half Century Symposium” approaches, Violet is temporarily in the same vicinity, the picturesque burg of Copper Mallow, home of Trinity College, to complete her latest book, The Crying Killer at her Uncle Lawton’s home. She responds to an invitation to join in from a “Bellwood Scholar” and member of the English department, Margo Dyle. Dyle is one of the key organizers and an hardcore Bellwood devotee, many of whom are called “Furies,” after vengeance seeking female deities from Greek mythology. Violet’s response is curt: “I don’t participate in those sorts of events.”
Because her mother hung herself (in an adjacent barn) while she was in her crib, Violet has, well, a lot of mother issues. “As a result of this early trauma, I had an uneasy relationship with the whole concept of motherhood, but it always seemed to be close by … I was a writer drawn in particular to dark, twisted stories about mothers … I had chosen to write about the Crying Killer in large part because of how he cried for his “mommy” after every attack …”
Amid the stress of the conference and trying to finish The Crying Killer, another unwelcome dynamic comes into play. Violet begins receiving increasingly unnerving, anonymous messages from someone claiming to be her child. A placard with “Hello Mother” found stuck on her windshield is the start, but soon her phone rings and a garbled voice asks, “When are you coming home?” They continue, becoming more menacing. Could they be coming from one of the Furies who loathe her?
But there’s just one little problem: Violet has never been pregnant or wanted to be. She’s almost 50 as the book begins anyway. Plus, her issues with her uterus are a constant companion. “Ironically, though, at the time I found the card on my windshield, I had been thinking about my reproductive capabilities, more than I probably ever had in my adult life … I had polyps and fluctuating perimenopausal hormones that frequently left my underwear and bedding looking like a crime scene.” We learn about this medical condition in graphic detail.
“A twinge in my uterus woke me up … I knew what was about to happen. Imagine a rodeo, where there’s a bucking bronco behind a gate just waiting to rampage. That was about to happen in my underpants … For me, Aunt Flo wasn’t a cherubic apple-cheeked lady who showed up once a month with her knitting needles to hang out for five days, stream Murder, She Wrote, and eat rocky road ice cream; for me she was a demon who dwelled down there.”
When the notes keep coming, Violet ponders the possibilities of why she’s targeted and who could it be? “Thanks to my work, I often thought of myself as a lonely planet orbited by deviants.”
As much an exploration of how impossible it ultimately is for a family of an obsessively deified dead artist to maintain any semblance of control of one’s own history as it is a thriller, Furious Violet succeeds brilliantly on both counts. Violent is demonized by the “followers” and infatuated “fans” of her mother. She is chided brutally for not having children and not caring enough about the “Gospel of Juliet.” Her own humanity has been utterly eclipsed by the fanatics who have appropriated her own mother’s life – and left her out of it.
Violet continues to grapple with the notes and calls, and we have a long list of potential suspects. But midway through the story, Walker tosses a grenade into the already perplexing mix when the agent for Juliet’s literary estate contacts both Violet and Lawton with startling news: Someone has uncovered a heretofore unknown letter, seemingly part of a series written by Juliet when she was in psychiatric treatment. The letter says that she didn’t really commit suicide, that husband Hugh was the root of her problems, that the body hanging in the family’s barn was in fact a young, banished lover of Hugh’s. The letter also details why she fled, leaving her philandering husband and their newborn. It’s a great twist, utterly unexpected and complicates the roster of suspects even more.
Furious Violet is a tight and satisfying thriller, a refreshing antidote to today’s steady stream of recycled plots about some group of people who gather at some location and reveal some past, can’t-stay-buried-secrets.
The multi-dimensional arc of the plot allows Walker to fully explore the concepts and themes she so adeptly unpacks. Here is an incisive view of the cultiness of so many aspects of western culture. Be it politics or art, we see how an unquenchable thirst for details, for (purported) truth, is, in the end, assured to be at least shallow, more often, destructive.
The grand guignol finale is a gruesome delight. Don’t miss Furious Violet.
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
