Book 34 The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

 

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman fulfilled the category “A Book about Someone Leading a Double Life” for the PopSugar 2022 Reading Challenge.
I read a couple of books for this category, but Mrs. Pollifax worked the best. It’s mostly a cozy mystery (with elements of suspense), and people usually underestimate the amateur sleuths in those stories. In this novel, Mrs. Pollifax goes to Mexico City and helps solve a murder by pretending to be a tourist. In fact, she’s working as a spy for the government the whole time.

The story was written in 1966, at the start of the Cold War, which makes the book even more interesting. Mrs. Pollifax is an amazingly bold, vivacious character that is unassuming. Everybody believes she’s just a middle-aged housewife, but she thwarts spies, lives through all sorts of disasters, and is doing her middle-aged, awesome woman thing. That was one of the things I loved about the novel. It demonstrated how women of a certain age really have their stuff together. We all can totally get things done, like being a CIA agent in Mexico after raising our children.

I also read Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. I planned to use it for the “Knife on the Cover” prompt, but I realized it would fit this category, too. I didn’t want to highlight it as the main subject for the post. It’s a grisly murder book where the hero is a villain at the same time. But we all know that because most of us have watched the TV show.

Reading the novel got me thinking. It’s my second Dexter story. The show did a great job turning the first novel into an entire season of television. This book showed me something I’d missed only watching the show. I understood Dexter as a character much better reading than viewing. I heard Dexter’s internal monologue, his thoughts. The writing illustrated how hard he was working to pretend to be human in front of everybody else. That’s a critical aspect of the stories. Here’s this serial killer working for the police department as a blood spatter expert when he's the one killing the bad guys and taking care of the problems. Interestingly, he’s having social issues all over.

Anyway, I had quite the contrast of books for the prompt.

I give The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman Four Stars for its fun, interesting Miss Marple at a younger age.

I give Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay Four Stars for the author’s audacity to write about a serial killer being the hero.