Something in Common
Written by, J.R. Lindermuth
J.R. Lindermuth ©2006
Published by Whiskey Creek Press
223Pages

Remember Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, mystery writer/amateur sleuth on the television show, Murder She Wrote? She made all of the highly trained professional law enforcement officers look like idiots by solving the crime. Luckily for her though the dumb Cabot Maine local-yokel Tom Bosley looking sheriff and his minions always seemed to come bursting in, guns drawn at the last minute, right before it looked like Fletcher was about to get a cap busted in her mousy little head. She was stupid enough to confront the bad guy and give a play-play commentary of the murder and the murderer’s mistakes without (What every cop knows he or she should have) back-up. Somebody shoot the old biddy already. Murder She Wrote aside, for some reason popular culture portrays average everyday officers of the law as half blind troglodytes afraid of facts and distracted by shiny objects. J.R. Lindermuth’s novel Something in Common is a much needed departure from that trend.
Something in Common begins on a non-portentous Saturday night in the rural town of Swatara Creek Pennslvania . A local woman Mrs. Taylor encounters on her front porch (actually her cat Tom-Tom does the preliminary encountering) an unknown woman’s severed head. Aaron Brubaker Swatara Creek Chief of police unofficially recruits the former Chief of police, retired Dan ‘Sticks’ Hetrick. Hetrick is shrewd and observant, a home town Columbo.
Lindermuth writes, “His eyes began their own examination of the body and, precision machine that it was, his mind shut down the emotional focus…and switched to another gear, compartmentalizing what he observed, sifting it logically in a manner that had become second nature through experience.”
Like a whittling and chambray shirt wearing Sherlock Holmes Sticks gleans the clues and cuts through the suspects, until two more people are killed and he has a final confrontation with a remorseless killer.
Lindermuth allows the reader to think they are smarter than the author. He opens the book with a murder and the reader thinks, ‘Yup, been there done that…Oh no, not the cat bit, lame, lame, lame.’ Then he introduces who you think is the hero, Chief Brubaker, only to find that he is more concerned about the P.R aspect of the murder. Finally, we meet the real hero Hetrick. He has a complicated relationship with Brubaker and they are at odds because Hetrick wants to redeem himself. ‘Okay, we’ve seen this before too.’
Suddenly, Lindermuth is introducing character after character, including the new young handsome pastor Jeffery Bascom, mail-order-bride to be Linda Krang and local nut-case eccentric artist George Oxenreider. All of these characters serve more than one specific function in Lindermuth’s narrative. His expert plotting proves how dumb we really are as readers. Each time, we get fished-in the hook spears right through our gray matter and he seems to attempt to pull us out of the water of our ignorance. We flail and swim blindly sinking the hook further into our gills. We exclaim “I know who did it! He did it! No, she did it! Um, no wait, ah, they did it! Heck, somebody did it!” We’re sucked into a maelstrom, a vortex, a whirlpool of false leads and clues. Like Dante had Virgil to guide him down into the inferno, Lindermuth gives us Sticks Hetrick to show the way.

-Lee Gooden 9-5-06