We Begin at the End

The novel relies on a shifting narrative perspective. Within each chapter, divisions are told from the perspective of Sheriff Walk and Duchess Radley. The perspective is not told in the first person, that is, the style, diction, and syntax do not reflect the age or the personality of the character. Nor does the narration expose what the character does not know. Each perspective unfolds in the present, reflecting what each character learns as the mystery of Star’s murder unfolds. This narrative structure is called limited omniscience. The reader shares what the character does and what happens to the character, and we are given their thoughts on what is happened and why they are doing what they do. Thus, the novel ultimately stays within the frame of a larger authority.

Given that this is a murder mystery, limited omniscience allows the reader to share in the discovery of clues as both characters struggle toward insight and solution. We share experiences in a kind of you-are-there documentarian realism. We piece together insight along with the character.

At critical moments, however, this shifting perspective creates dramatic irony. Dramatic irony measures the distance between what a reader knows and what the characters know. For instance, we know long before Walk’s revelation in court that he has been diagnosed with career-ending Parkinson’s. Even as Duchess heads across four states to kill the man responsible for her mother’s death, we know Vincent is innocent and is, in fact, Duchess’s father. We know what the jury does not know: that the upstanding sheriff of Cape Haven has just committed perjury.

A shifting perspective, however, is more than a gimmick. After all, the mystery could easily have been told from a single limited perspective. The shifting between the adult Walk and the child Duchess allows the novel itself to approximate the world that both characters much come to accept, a world of contradictions and uncertainty, a world where people act without complete knowledge, a world where facts become distressingly irrelevant, a world, in short, full of irony. We are shuttled within chapters between perspectives. That is itself unsettling because we expect to give each character an entire chapter. The formal structure challenges the reader to engage the unsettling real-time world lurking when it comes time to close up the novel, to live, like the population of Cape Haven, forever poised over a cliff, forever in uncertainty.

The novel is a multi-generational story of the Radley family: Grandfather Hal, mother Star and father Vincent, and kids Robin and Duchess. The novel covers more than 30 years of the family. By any measure, it is a dysfunctional family. The father, a convicted murderer, runs over the aunt; the grandfather is shot by his daughter’s part-time lover, who owns a strip club where the mother, a bitter former beauty queen now a perpetually recovering alcoholic, performs; and the grandchild, age 5, shoots his mother; and his sister travels across four states to kill her father, whom she does not know is her father, who ultimately commits suicide. Along the way, the girl falsely accuses her adoptive father of molesting her. The Radley family is not just an episode of Dr. Phil—it is an entire season.

Because the novel refuses to allow despair or hopelessness the final word, the Radleys move on to a kind of profound healing. That healing is symbolized by Duchess’ school presentation in the closing pages. Duchess, now returned to school after her trauma of both, completes a welcome-back-to-school project, a presentation about her family. At the heart of the psychological profile of both Duchess and her brother is their perception of their family. Growing up without a father and nursing their alcoholic mother through numerous liaisons, growing up certain their grandfather did not want them, neither child has any reassuring framework for understanding the concept of a family.

After their mother is shot dead and then their grandfather, whom they find out is not the man they thought he was, is also shot dead, the kids are placed within the complicated dynamic of the foster care system. They are moved from home to home and interviewed by prospective adoptive parents like commodities. In the climactic showdown with Vincent at the cemetery and then the revelation that this heroic, if troubled, man was her father and that everything he did was for them, including his willingness to spare both his children from the horrors of prison life, Duchess finally does what she has not been able to do in her 15 years: She embraces her family, whatever its imperfections, as a loving and supportive unit.

Initially, she delayed working on the project, certain that her family, with its notoriety as the town’s outlaw family, would never work as a class project. In the end, she celebrates her discovery in her presentation. This, she says in all but words, this is my family, this is who I am. In a book replete with noble gestures, none is more inspirational than when, in the closing paragraph, Duchess stands up before her class: “She cleared her throat, turned to the front and began. She led with her father, the outlaw, Vincent King” (367).

Marketed as a crime thriller (indeed, the novel won the prestigious Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the year, selected by the Crime Writers Association), the novel has all the elements of a crime thriller. There is a murder, and there are many possible suspects. The sheriff does his due diligence and follows the conventional procedural expectations. Motives are plentiful. The police center on a person of interest and make the arrest. The action moves to a courtroom where an up-and-coming DA and a defense lawyer vaguely out of her element do combat. There is a succession of witnesses as the DA mounts a case without a weapon, perhaps, but with a clear motive: jealousy. The action moves inevitably to the jury verdict and the fallout from that decision.

In a conventional crime thriller, the trial itself symbolically offers a world that makes sense, a world that is not governed by the urgencies of the heart. A process is followed. Evidence is presented, witnesses testify, and arguments are made on both sides that are rational and logical. An impartial judge maintains the integrity of law and order. The accumulated evidence ultimately leads to an informed jury's choice, yes or no, guilty or not guilty.

Vincent is tried three times, most notably in the novel’s 70-page centerpiece, in which he is charged with the murder of his common-law wife. In each case, the trial system fails Vincent. He is sentenced initially to the state prison system. He is only 15—the hit-and-run accident that killed Sissy Radley was exactly that, an accident. As the sheriff says, “It was not a place for a fifteen-year-old boy, no matter the detail. The judge had sat stone-faced as he made that dazzling call” (22). Then 20 years are added to his sentence even though the fight in prison was entirely staged by Star’s father, who never faces any accountability for his manipulations. The man he hires deliberately provokes Vincent. In the centerpiece trial, Vincent is charged with shooting his common-law wife—a bogus charge. Vincent is taking the blame to cover for his son. He is exonerated, but only after Walk lies to the court.

The justice system, then, reveals itself to be as charged with irony and profound contradictions as the world each character comes to see. Add to that the shooting death of Darke (more a police-assisted suicide) and the various encounters Duchess has with principals in different schools in which her actions, although entirely understandable and even necessary, are judged without logic, and the novel uses the symbol of law and order ironically. Bad guys are good. Good guys are bad. Verdicts are wrong when they are right, right when they are wrong. The system only works when it doesn’t. That hard truth is crucial in the coming-of-age narrative of Duchess, who grows up in the Old West's fantasy world where good guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black hats.