Wendy Hornsby

I was hooked from the first page of Wendy Hornsby's newest Maggie MacGowan mystery, The Color of Light. It opens as Maggie, now an investigative film maker, sits watching an old Super 8 movie taken by her father of a group of pre-teen girls walking down a street in Berkeley, California. Maggie was one of them. Her father happened to catch the group in a confrontation with the neighborhood bully, a confrontation that still left Maggie with guilt feelings even after thirty years. The film also show more brings back strong memories of the Vietnamese mother of one of her childhood friends who was brutally murdered on the very day that film was made.
Maggie is in Berkeley to clean out her family home after her father's death and her mother's move to southern California. She is something of a local celebrity after her success as a film maker, but Berkeley is still enough of a small town that families reside in the same houses as in Maggie's childhood, and her friends and their parents still hold secrets that were not apparent to the eyes of a child.
Protagonist Maggie MacGowan is trained to ask questions for her film work, and is not afraid to use her skills in solving a thirty year old murder. Beneath the tranquil surface of the quiet neighborhood of well-kept lawns, and Maggie's physics professor father's carefully designed flower bed with which he illustrated the principles of the visual spectrum, lie dangerous secrets. Maggie's high school boy friend turns up and nearly rekindles their old relationship, until the jealousy of his alcoholic wife can cause near-deadly consequences.
Author Hornsby writes with sensitivity about the complex, multi-ethnic character of Berkeley residents. Part mystery and party romance, The Color of Light had me turning the pages eagerly until the end, when the strands of a complex plot finally come together in a satisfying conclusion. (As published in Suspense Magazine) show less

Maggie is still mourning the death of her husband, Mike Flint, and has been throwing herself into her work to keep from brooding. Not thrilled about her first Thanksgiving without him, she stops at the market late on Thanksgiving eve to pick up supplies for the dish she'll be taking to dinner at her mother's the next day. On her way into the store, she is stopped by a strange woman who claims that Maggie is her daughter, Marguerite.

Knowing this to be untrue, Maggie catches the attention of show more the store's security guards, and the woman is escorted out. The next morning, a news report of a hit-and-run in the area makes Maggie think it might be that woman, and it is.

She gives all the information she has to the police, and heads to Berkeley to spend the holiday with her family. But later that day, she discovers that the woman, Isabelle, was indeed, her mother.

Suddenly, everything Maggie has known about herself is false, and she decides to deliver Isabelle's ashes to France herself so she can meet her biological family. But when she gets there, she discovers a web of deceit and machinations which indicate that Isabelle's death may not have been an accident.

Along with Maggie's history, we learn something of the history of France and its arcane inheritance laws. Hornsby's prose is exquisite, and the joy of reading the book came to an end much too quickly. More Maggie McGowen, please! show less

As one of his last requests, Maggie's late husband detective Mike Flint asked her to find out what happened in one of his cold cases. A young gang member, Jesus Ramon, who also happened to be one of Mike's informants, simply vanished one day after Mike dropped him off. Everyone assumed that Jesus, who was an addict and a small-scale pusher, had died of an overdose or been killed in a gang disagreement and the body quietly disposed of.

But Maggie is determined to fulfill Mike's wish, to give show more her search some credibility, she decides to make it the focus of her next television special. Delving into Mike's files and talking to his old colleagues, Maggie realizes she's onto something bigger than she expected when someone breaks into her house.

The descriptions of documentary filmmaking and the grittier side of Los Angeles are wonderful, and Hornsby is an amazing writer. It's good to see her (and Maggie) again. show less

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