For PI crime, I decided to go with the quintessential badass PI of my heart, the unmatchable Veronica Mars. Mr. Kiss and Tell is the second foray of Ms. Mars into the world of literature, following Thomas's debut Mars Investigations novel The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line, which served as a follow-up to the Kickstarter Veronica Mars movie last year. I listened to Tan Line as an audiobook narrated by Kristen Bell herself, and I really enjoyed losing myself in her familiar tones, almost as if the voiceover narration for which the show was so lauded had carried over into my own personal read-aloud. It was glorious, and I one hundred percent enjoyed this new chapter in Veronica's cultural saga, and it felt almost like candy to be able to write about it and think hard about it for this post. I *may* have thought a little too hard, as this post is significantly late, but behold it in its finished and unpolished glory now.
Over the past year, I've gotten into crime novels, some for this challenge, some just because. I read In The Woods by Tana French obsessively and Harvest was for last year's challenge, and it helped me to think how these books dealt with crime differently. The specificity of this genre choice, "PI crime," made me think about PI crime versus police procedural and how they're different. I considered reading The Poet by Michael Connelly, because the main character, Jack McEvoy, is technically a reporter and works on his own investigation similar to a PI, but I decided I should stick to bare bones and see how it worked for me before I departed. (Still going to read The Poet, of course, because it boasts Edgar Allan Poe inspirations in the murders and I'm obsessed with Poe and his tendrils into pop culture.) So the gist of Mr. Kiss and Tell is Veronica's investigation of a case brought to her by the Neptune Grand Hotel, the embodiment of the monied and manipulative in Neptune. A girl named Grace Manning has been found half-dead in a field miles away, a girl who was last seen at the Grand and has accused a Grand employee (conveniently no longer in the country) of rape and assault. The girl is someone from Veronica's past whom she helped before when Grace was a child but was unable to ultimately save, entrenched trust issues between Grace and Veronica. When Veronica clears the implicated employee of alleged criminal wrongdoing and she is released from the case, Veronica cannot help but feel that she must continue on. She hasn't found Grace's attacker, and although the Grand was only paying her to disprove Grace's story, Veronica feels compelled to continue on her own dime. "No, I'm not working for them. Not anymore," Veronica tells Grace. "As far as they're concerned I've done my job and I'm off the case. Which means right now they're probably on the phone with your lawyer, telling him your suit is falling apart. But I still want to figure this out, Grace. And if I'm going to help you, I need to know the truth" (page 111, emphasis added). One of the defining characteristics of Neptune--and a major subplot to the novel's story--is the fact that those with the money hold the power and subsequently the justice. The police department is providing Veronica with little to no help on this case, and it is this, seeing the clear line between police and PI and the rules that bind each party, that truly showcases how Veronica operates differently. However, shortly after Veronica tells Grace she wants to keep going, Grace gets angry, telling Veronica she's "just like those cops, aren't you?" This, more than anything, seems to be a catalyst for Veronica's quest to end the Manning case and find justice for the girl she couldn't save.
Veronica is a PI in every sense: she fights for Grace's case even when the Grand (who hired her originally) is done with it. Her priorities are clear from the beginning: even when she takes the case, her response to Mr. Hickman's proposal is '"I'll do my best to find out what happened to this girl"' (page 33). Not that she would work to disprove her story, as was her technical job description, but that she would find out what happened to this girl. Veronica has crystal-clear, razor-sharp memories of her own rape case being denied credibility because of her circumstances, and the way Grace's case is presented by this man gets her hackles up. She fights tooth and nail for what she believes in, sometimes compromising for outside-the-box methods in order to get justice. It's in her blood: her dad, Keith Mars, is the original PI, and Veronica grew up at the reception desk of Mars Investigations, taking the cheating-husband tails her dad didn't have time for as soon as she could focus a camera:
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| Veronica in the pilot of the TV show, staking out a seedy motel (2004). |
If I talked about every thread in this book and the Veronica Mars universe that I wanted to, it's possible this review would be longer than the book itself. There are so many themes I wanted to touch on, like the corruption of the police in this text, the failure of the justice system to provide legitimate justice to those below a certain paygrade, the politics of money and power in Neptune, the way these themes seem to be ever more sickeningly echoed in current events, but I do not have the space or the heart at this particular moment. So I will add them to the forever-growing grocery basket of ideas that are crawling to get out of my head and end by saying that this text has allowed me to think deeply about a book that did not profess itself to be particularly deep or world-changing. But like Veronica Mars has for my entire life with her, she has continually inspired me and catalyzed my own personal growth.
