Carpool - Hardcover

Mary Cahill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067973113X ISBN 13: 9780679731139

Publisher: Random House, 1991

Synopsis

"Entertaining...Jenny Jeade, the housewife heroine...careens through suburbia, one step ahead of a nervous breakdown."SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLEToday she's a hassled suburban Mom, but a few years ago, Jenny Meade worked as a pilot in a private delivery service she ran with her father. She's been grounded on account of the dangers above, but the dangers below threaten her life when she discovers a dead body hanging from a tree in a park. Suicide seems to explain everything, but Jenny and part-time detective Tom Black Cloud are not convinced. And as she struggles to forget the fantasies of flying, Jenny accelerates headling toward domestic drama and an international incident with echoes from her past and a warning for her future....From the Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"Entertaining...Jenny Jeade, the housewife heroine...careens through suburbia, one step ahead of a nervous breakdown."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Today she's a hassled suburban Mom, but a few years ago, Jenny Meade worked as a pilot in a private delivery service she ran with her father. She's been grounded on account of the dangers above, but the dangers below threaten her life when she discovers a dead body hanging from a tree in a park. Suicide seems to explain everything, but Jenny and part-time detective Tom Black Cloud are not convinced. And as she struggles to forget the fantasies of flying, Jenny accelerates headling toward domestic drama and an international incident with echoes from her past and a warning for her future....

From the Paperback edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

Erma Bombeck meets Angela Lansbury with unfortunate results in this suburban mystery featuring a carpooling mom, a dead farmer, a stone-faced Indian detective, and an assortment of aimlessly adulterous bit players--all manipulated with amateurish enthusiasm by this veteran carpooler and first-time Baltimore writer. The schedule is clipped to the car's visor with a clothespin: swim practice, breakfast, kindergarten drop-off, elementary-school drop-off, high-school drop-off, SaveMart, shoe repair, lunch at Wendy's with the girls, then pick-ups, after-school activities, dinner, and bed. Jenny Meade, once a pilot and co-owner of her own medical-transport business, has been reduced by marriage and childbearing to life in a Honda hatchback, daydreaming between jaunts of long-gone adventures in a Piper Cherokee and engaging in conversation with her dog. Much maligned by her children and ignored by her husband, Jenny finds relief when she discovers an apparent suicide in a graveyard near her daughter's school and can occupy her mind with suspicions of foul play. The detective on the case--morose, deadpan Thomas Black Cloud--asks the roadbound housewife to keep an eye out for clues. This is all the encouragement Jenny needs: while speeding across the suburban-rural countryside, she not only solves Cloud's case but manages also to resolve her marital problems, reestablish her former career, solve the lingering mystery of her own parents' death a decade earlier, and learn--difficult as it is--to leave the driving to others. Cahill stumbles repeatedly in her eagerness to seduce the reader--a failed effort, though likely to engage the sympathies of other carpoolers across the country. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067973113X
• ISBN 13: 9780679731139
• Binding: Hardcover