Email this article
Printable version
Local author uses experience in switch to novels
Tekla Dennison Miller draws on life as warden, sister of abused wife
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Review
Inevitable Sentences by Tekla Dennison Miller, Medallion Press, 361 pages, $7.95 original paperback. Miller will speak about her book at 6:30 p.m. March 3 at Maria's Bookshop, 960 Main Ave.
She was warden of both a men's and a women's prison, which gave her the material for The Warden Wore Pink. Her life with her sister, an abused wife, was one of the subjects of A Bowl of Cherries.
Now Miller has combined those two areas of expertise with her time spent living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula into a mass-market paperback novel Inevitable Sentences. It's the sequel to her first novel, Life Sentences.
It would be tempting to compare this mostly fast-moving novel with the woman-in-peril movies made for daytime televison. But that would be inaccurate because the woman at the book's center, the one most in peril, Celeste Brookstone, (spoiler alert) kills the serial killer who attacks her.
Nor is she written as one of the blonde, bouffanted, young actors who play the lead in such low-budget, off-the-peg movies.
Celeste, 52, is happily in love and starting her own business, a refuge for women and children fleeing domestic abuse.
Still, every female character in the book has escaped a violent husband and is in a stage of rebuilding her courage.
This isn't to claim we've found our local Patricia Cornwell, who bases her murder mysteries on massive detail about forensics. (Cornwell did work in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia as her protagonist does, but as a technical writer and computer analyst, not as a forensic pathologist.)
Miller's books are simpler and less adorned than Cornwell's. She's targeting the mass market with no frills.
She makes good use of the harsh climate along Lake Superior - symbolically with growing storms and as a plot device when characters can't move around quickly because of the snow. As for symbolism, Celeste's refuge is a lighthouse. Is that heavy-handed? It scrapes by.
Any good thriller needs suspense and Miller's skill in building tension varies.
Her most compelling passages are when the charming serial killer, aided by naïve, besotted prison worker, Lizzie, is about to escape.
The final days are seen through the inexperienced eyes of the lovelorn Lizzie, who's charged with springing the man she sees as her white knight. Lizzie's alarm at all the details that might go wrong keep the reader worrying with her.
On the other hand, late in the book when Celeste has already saved herself, her lover and the sheriff have a needlessly long discussion about how to rescue her when we already know she's OK.
And the author reveals why the killer has targeted Celeste on page 37. Would such a detail be better kept as a surprise?
Miller wants warmth in her book to counteract the violence. She does this by using many, many details of decorating and food provided by Celeste and the women in her shelter. The result is sweet but sometimes skippable.
As is the devotion of Celeste's lover, a man drawn as so wholly adorable by contrast with the male villains, that he's a type rather than a person.
Still, it's a fine cottage industry Miller has going in her retirement.
Out here in far-flung and snowy western Colorado, she offers an example of how others might recycle hard-won knowledge and try putting it on the page.
advertisement
