After All These Years

1993, 1997 HarperCollins edition
Susan Isaacs
After All These Years
Original price $6.99, purchase price unknown
Very worn paperback with broken spine
B-

It's fifteen years since Compromising Positions, so the title has an extra layer of meaning for me.  Rosie Meyers's husband leaves her the day after their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and after he gets killed she reunites with her high school boyfriend.  I said in my Compromising review, "...there seems to be a degree of wish-fulfillment in her mysteries, with their middle-aged (or nearly) heroines with imperfect but good bodies, who find devoted lovers."  Rosie is 47 but still attractive enough to not only get her ex back, but to attract a very good-looking 22-year-old friend of her son's.

Rosie is the prime suspect in the murder, and when she goes on the run, this high school English teacher finds herself doing all kinds of things she never did before, from stealing fast food to holding a neighbor at (cap)gunpoint.  She's a less sympathetic character than Judith Singer, and the mystery isn't as good, but the story held my interest.  

One notable thing about some of the '93 books I'm reading is that some of the women get very anti-Reagan-and-Bush.  I saw it in Heimel and I see it here in Isaacs.  Anne Lamott, coming up, has a great line which I won't quote till we get there.  Lamott and Heimel were writing in and of the late '80s/ early '90s, but of course publishing in the first year of Clinton.  Isaacs sets her mystery in the world of new & old money clashing.  Perhaps we had to get this deep into the '90s before there was enough distance from the '80s to vent about that decade.  Or it may just be these writers' personalities and perspectives.