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| Virtual Tour November 10 - December 5, 2025 |
Synopsis:
"Michelson's first-rate mystery novel...makes for addictive reading." –Foreword Clarion Reviews
It's 1978, and Jennifer Morgan, a sassy New Yorker, has escaped to the counterculture village of Flanders, Massachusetts. Her peaceful life is disrupted when one of her customers at the Café Galadriel is found dead. Everyone is a suspect—including the gentle artisan woodworker, the Yeats-wannabe poet, the town's anti-war hero, the peace-loving Episcopalian minister, and the local organic farmer who can hold a grudge.
Concern for her community prompts Jennifer to investigate the murder with the sometimes-reluctant help of Ford McDermott, a young police officer. Little does she know that the solution lies in the hidden past.
Part of the Solution blends snappy dialogue, unconventional settings, and a classic oldies soundtrack, capturing the essence of a traditional whodunnit in a counterculture era.
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BOOK REVIEW
The characters' desire for retreat to a safe community where the woes of the world don’t creep in
is understandable (and relevant today). The town of Flanders, Massachusetts, just down the road from
a college campus, is that place for many people; however, there are
others who don’t appreciate their lifestyle, “Flanders had been invaded by an
opinionated, motley collection of sixties refugees.” That tension within the
town is interesting, but it disappeared quickly and is not the focus of PART OF
THE SOLUTION.
What is the focus in PART OF THE SOLUTION is the characters, most of whom are full of vigor and high on their righteousness, as twenty-somethings tend to be – and set in 1978, often, they are literally high, too. Each member of the core group of players is easy to visualize, thanks to Michelson’s detailed descriptions of not only their looks but their attitudes, political stances, and personalities.
Less clear are the characters' ages; I had to do math and tap my limited knowledge of the Vietnam War to get in range. (Hmm. 1978 – [US leaves Saigon] + 4 years grad school + [give-or-take] 40 years = 26ish in '78 and 60-something years old and/or maybe 2018?) I established that main character Jennifer was likely born ten to fifteen years before me. I was twelve and living in North Texas when the bulk of the story happened, and me and my world looked different from that of PART OF THE SOLUTION (even with my siblings six and eight years older -go figure). But, Michelson’s world is atmospheric and nostalgic, sprinkled with retro attire and style, record players and tapes playing Bob Dillon and Joan Baez, and a readily available variety of recreational drugs.
“If New England, he told himself, was Deerfield Academy and Lord Geoffrey Amherst killing Iroquois for the king, it was also Mother Jones and Big Bill Hayward and the striking workers at the Lawrence textile mill.”
PART
OF THE SOLUTION is a sharply-written, cerebral novel. I give high marks for the
diction and cultural, historical, and literary references dropped throughout
the book. These pair well with several of the characters personalities and their life in and
around academia. Readers who are afficionados of the times, or were adults in
the seventies, will likely recognize the referenced movements and protests of
those times. I’m not sure younger readers will understand draft lotteries and
dodgers or needing a dime for a phone call. But for me, even being a tween then and an English
major some years later, I am a little embarrassed by how much time I spent checking
Merriam-Webster, and I used Google more frequently than I care to admit. This
took me out of the story, as did the frequent point-of-view changes that
happened not only in back-to-back paragraphs but also within single paragraphs, which forced regular re-reading.
Nonetheless,
I read PART OF THE SOLUTION in one seating and stayed engaged primarily because
I needed to see how the contemporary-set prologue would resolve itself, but also
because of the mystery behind the death of one character and near-death of
another back in 1978. The author provided a satisfactory, somewhat open-ended solution
to the former and resolved the whodunit parts of the latter in unique and
clever ways. And, I appreciate that unlike many mysteries, the characters
really struggled with the horror of what had happened and felt unsettled with the case unresolved.
It's
no secret that editing is very important to this reader, so I would be remiss
if I didn’t mention the stellar job Michelson’s team has done with PART OF THE
SOLUTION. Extra credit is given for the “permissions” section at the end of the
book, which shows that the author jumped through the proper and legally
required hoops to use copyrighted words from songs and texts within a novel. Sadly, many authors don’t do this (and I fear they don’t know and/or
don’t care that they should), and it’s disappointing.
I
absolutely recommend PART OF THE SOLUTION as an engaging, sometimes
challenging novel with a retro vibe, original cast of characters, and
refreshing mystery angle.
Read an Excerpt:
Chapter One
Jennifer surveyed the café with satisfied proprietary eyes. The freshmen at the two corner tables were an excellent sign. Having arrived in Williamstown the day before, having unpacked their carefully faded blue jeans and dispatched their carefully dry-eyed parents, having found their way to the registrar’s office and the bookstore with barely concealed terror, they had, no doubt, asked whomever they could find where, you know, it was happening. And they had been sent straight to Café Galadriel to nurse their bludgeoned intellects and wounded sexuality on Jennifer’s coffee for the next four years.
Around them, the unmatched wooden chairs and tables of the café held the usual Monday afternoon crowd. Brownley (Philosophy) and Krasner (Sociology) sat over a game of chess. The Western Massachusetts Women’s Anti-Violence Task Force occupied the round table in the center of the room. Samir Molchev, self-styled seeker of truth, was alone at a corner table reading Suzuki’s The Field of Zen. On the salmon walls, a pre-Raphaelite poster of the Lady of Shallot hung beside a poster of Che Guevara. It will be a great day, read the sign above Wendy’s bakery display case, when schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. A tattered sofa occupied one wall of the room, the coffee table in front of it piled with backgammon sets and old copies of Ramparts magazine. A Bob Marley tape played on the stereo.
It was the moment of the year when the café was moving into autumn, away from its summer tourist mode. Behind the cash register, Wendy was packing away the pitchers that had held iced tea and cold cider. Her summer uniform of paisley sun dresses had given way to long sleeves and flowing, ankle-length dresses. Short, with a rounded body and small face, Wendy’s size was belied by clothes that began at her shoulders and fell draping to the floor. Her curly, dark red hair followed the same line, rippling down her back and ending just above her waist. Jennifer, whose knowledge of poetry had outlasted work on her dissertation, would have occasion to wonder in the coming weeks if Wendy hadn’t modeled herself on the Tennyson heroine behind her on the wall.
Jennifer herself was at her usual spot, the table by the Vermont Castings wood stove that, in the winter months, would reduce heating bills while contributing to what she thought of as the café’s fake authenticity. She was dressed, as usual, in dungarees, Indian cotton, and the sandals she insisted on wearing until the snow fell, but her short summer haircut was growing out, and her thick brown hair was starting to take on its haphazard winter unruliness.
“I remember you guys,” Jennifer was saying. “You were all practicing to be Leon Trotsky, and you polished your rhetoric and your steely gaze on girls like me who were stuffing envelopes for the cause.”
Beside her, Zachery Lerner grimaced.
“We weren’t really that bad. We were just showing off for each other.”
“Well, you could have fooled me. But anyway, I think it’s amazing that Williams College actually hired you to teach the impressionable young.”
Zach’s reputation had preceded him, not only at Williams but among anyone who remembered the decade just past: Berkeley in the late sixties, a first book on working class resistance to the war, three years in Leavenworth for refusing induction. Jennifer had recognized him, both by reputation and by the studious features that reminded her of all the budding revolutionaries she had always figured she would marry. His curly hair, already a premature salt-and-pepper, circled a rounded face with deep-set brown eyes and broad features. The lumberjack clothes that covered his burly frame would clearly win no friends among the board of trustees. His face, under horn-rimmed glasses, was that of a Russian Jewish revolutionary, which, at several generations removed, he was.
The front door of the café opened with a loud kick. Annie McGantry, Flanders’ organic farmer and herbalist, wedged the door with her shoulder and pulled a trolley topped by a large, covered barrel through the doorway and into the room. She spotted Jennifer and made her way to the table. She eased the barrel off the trolley, made sure that both the trolley and the barrel were standing safely upright, and threw herself into an empty chair.
“Goddamn. Can you believe I ran out of barrels?” she greeted them. “You should see the Kirby cukes this year—it’s like they don’t want to quit. I tell them, ‘Come on, how many pickles do we need? I need to finish canning the tomatoes, so stop putting out, you little sluts, and save some energy for next year.’ I’ve already brought four barrels to the co-op. I can’t start selling them for a week—they won’t be fit for eating. But at least they’re out of my hair. Anyway, here’s your barrel. I put them on your September bill.”
Jennifer groaned. “You brought them here when I can’t sell them for a week? Do you know how much we’ve got piled up in the kitchen already? Susan Broady delivered all the—”
“I promise you you’re not as crowded as the co-op is. I’m, like, buried. You know, I peed on the seeds before I planted them,” she reflected. “I think that’s why everything’s doing so well.”
Jennifer grimaced. “Don’t tell me what you put in the brine, okay?”
Zach regarded Annie with curiosity. Annie was pretty, with strong, if currently grimy features, and she looked to Zach’s urban eyes to be precisely the kind of unwashed earth mother he would have expected to find in the Berkshires. He glanced briefly at the blue jeans stuffed into Wellington boots, the small breasts and narrow hips, the muscled forearms and dirty fingernails. He found himself impressed by the uncompromising look in the light grey eyes.
“Annie manages the co-op.” Jennifer turned to Zach. “She has a back room filled with medicinal herbs, so watch out if you get a rash in her vicinity. Three hundred years ago, she would have been burned as a witch.”
“So,” Zach indicated the pickles. “Tell me what you put in the brine. I love pickles. Or is it a secret old family recipe?”
“My family? Shit. My mother’s only old family recipe was for spoon bread.”
“Well, my grandmother bought pickles in barrels on the Lower East Side. So, what’s in the brine?”
“Salt, of course. Pickling spices. Apple cider vinegar.”
“My bubbe would have been horrified at pickles made with apple cider vinegar. She would have put them in the same category as whole wheat bagels.”
Annie eyed him, suspecting that he was only half teasing her and not entirely clear about what was wrong with whole wheat bagels. Still, she liked his solidity, and she had always been partial to curly hair. He looked utterly unmovable. Annie took it as a challenge.
“She never tried my pickles, then,” Annie drawled. Her voice took on a Southern mountain twang that did not seem quite in keeping with the ANIMALS ARE PEOPLE TOO bumper sticker on her pick-up truck. But it had, Jennifer knew, been her mother tongue. Annie was the offspring of a hard-drinking truck farmer and a deaconess in the Bethel Baptist Church, her small soul the preferred battle ground of her parents’ adversarial marriage. In the end, her father had won. Annie had scraped the mud of Mount Haven, Arkansas, off her first pair of Birkenstocks, hitchhiked to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, and sworn she would never set foot in a church again.
“Honey, you come over one night, and I’ll teach you the art of making pickles, Annie-style. Hell, you can harvest the rest of the damned cucumbers while you’re at it. I could use the help, and you,” she regarded the intellectual paleness of his skin, “could use some time in the great outdoors.”
There was movement at the corner table. Samir Molchev rose from his chair and placed his book in a cloth satchel embossed with Indian appliqué. Jennifer watched him come toward them, his tall body graceful in jeans and a long, white, collarless shirt.
There really was such a thing, Jennifer decided, as being too good-looking for your own good. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. It was as if Samir knew that his body was perfect: broad, graceful shoulders, a soft swirl of hair just visible through his open collar. Soft black hair fell to his shoulders, framing pronounced cheekbones and black, slightly slanted Tartan eyes. All he needed, she thought, was a gold leaf halo and scarlet robes, and the resemblance to a Byzantine icon would be complete.
Beside her, Annie stiffened. “It’s late,” she announced. “I have to get back.” Annie rose, strode across the room and into the café kitchen, and returned with a ladle and an empty mason jar. She raised the lip on the barrel, extracted half a dozen pickles with her fingers, and placed them in the jar. She ladled brine over them, screwed the top onto the jar, and set the jar in front of Zach on the table. “Here you are. A sample. Let it sit for a week before you open it.”
Samir came up behind her. “Peace, all.” He raised his hands in greeting and eyed Zach with curiosity.
Annie ignored him. Zach reached out a hand.
“I’m Zach Lerner. Good to meet you.”
“Zachary Lerner?” Samir asked slowly. The black eyes blinked.
“Yes, that Zachary Lerner,” Jennifer put in. “Williams has stolen him away from Berkeley.”
“And you should hear the Eisenhower Professor of American Democracy on the subject,” Zach smiled. “‘Just what we need, another draft dodger on the faculty!’”
Samir regarded Zach in silence.
Annie stirred impatiently. “Jen, I gotta go. Where should I put the barrel?”
Samir pulled his eyes away from Zach. “Let me get that into the kitchen for you.”
Annie narrowed her eyes. “Don’t bother.”
“Peace, sister. I’m just trying to help you.”
“I’m not your sister, and I don’t need your help.”
“Just leave it, Annie,” Jennifer said hurriedly. “I’ll get someone to help me with it later.”
Annie turned back to Jennifer as if the exchange with Samir had never happened. “Thanks,” she drawled. “I’ve got chickens wanting their dinner.” She nodded to Zach. “Remember, don’t eat those pickles for a week.”
The three of them watched her has she grabbed onto the trolley and wheeled it purposefully out the door. None of them had any reason to suspect that forty-eight hours later one of them would be dead.
***
Excerpt from Part of the Solution by Elana Michelson. Copyright 2025 by Elana Michelson. Reproduced with permission from Elana Michelson. All rights reserved.
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Author Bio:
Elana Michelson is a New York City native who has encamped with her wife Penny to the Hudson Valley, where she writes, reads, gardens, and volunteers with local social justice organizations. After thirty-five years as a professor, she has put down a beloved career of academic writing (and student papers) in favor of writing murder mysteries. She earned a PhD in English from Columbia University, but gained her knowledge of the life and times of Part of the Solution from, well, having been there.
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Haha! This book sounds like it is right up my alley! I was a teenager in the 70's. I think I must read this one. And I do love quirky character driven stories. Thanks so much for the review. <3
ReplyDeleteIt would probably be right up your alley then! I think had I been maybe five or six years older, it would have resonated with me a bit better. It's so wonderfully written, though, that I couldn't help but love it.
DeleteThe 60s and 70s were my era, so much of this book will resonate with me. Great review Kristine.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Maryann! I hope you do read it, and I'd love to book chat with you if you do.
DeleteThank you so much for the lovely review. You noted many of the things I had the most fun writing -- the music, the literary references, the 1970s dress and banter. Yes, you needed a dime for a phone call. Yes, Vietnam was an overwhelming reality that nobody needed Google to understand. (Just as well, since Google didn't exist then.) And thank you especially for noting that the characters really struggle with the horror of what happened; like you, I don't like mysteries in which death and murder are just an entertainment, so that the characters (and the reader) never face a moral quandary.
ReplyDeleteBy my reckoning, btw, Jennifer is 28 when the story takes place.
I'm happy to answer questions. I love hearing people's thoughts about the book.
Thank YOU for writing a compelling and literary-leaning book. I remember when I was growing up, my mom always said to me and my sister to keep a dime between our knees. Double-duty, there. HA! I saw that Ford was 28, but I couldn't get Jennifer older than 26 with my funky math attempts. I look forward to seeing what stories you have coming.
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