Miss Stella Sands gives us a thrilling addition to the loved mystery trope of bibliophile sleuths–one where the sleuth employs their genius-level skills in literary tools of detection. Other works that favourably compare in this tradition include Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium series, Mike Blink in Danielle Trussoni’s The Puzzle Master series.
Stella Sand’s Wordhunter excels as an introduction to the world of duo detectives, Maggie Moore and Detective Jackson. The story follows Maggie Moore, a pierced, genius graduate student of forensic linguistics, who teams up with Detective Jackson to solve police cases through the application of her solve police cases through the application of her unique skills. Maggie is astute at deducing sufficient elements of perpetrators’ profiles to aid arrests in a stalker-rape case and an abduction of the Mayor’s daughter central to the story in this first installment in the Wordhunter series.
Stella Sand’s Wordhunter excels as an introduction to the world of duo detectives, Maggie Moore and Detective Jackson.
Language enthusiasts will derive some pleasure in following Maggie’s exploration of linguistic patterns through sentence diagramming to make informed guesses about suspects’ educational, cultural backgrounds, and states of mind. Maggie’s life as a post-graduate student of forensic linguistics and research assistant to a narcissistic professor Ditmire, is told in a pulsing narrative by which we can appreciate her development as a character while driving the story forward.
For all her near-savant level skills, she’s not perfect – no one is. Maggie Moore herself is besieged with her own demons kept at bay with a convenient supply of drugs, sex, and booze. This bears a resemblance to her literary forebear, Sherlock, who also leans on opioid encouragement. Detective Jackson’s impressive competency in procedurals and vague background add to his mystery. No one is what they seem in this well-paced mystery-detective story.
Wordhunter sets Maggie in an imperfect world where we encounter themes of injustice and evil enabled or perpetuated by patriarchal institutions and systems.
If there wasn’t anything I didn’t like about this book, it would be that it was too compact. In the concluding chapter, without giving much away, the showdown was narrated in a third-person POV that read as an anesthetized report of the firefight between Detective Jackson and the culprit. This authorial choice, or narrative technique, could be appreciated as an intentional attempt or demonstration. However, one wonders if an actual exercise in descriptive narration might have heightened the tension and emotions invested in Detective Jackson’s fate and Maggie’s disposition as the scene fades into the final chapter.
This mystery series holds promise, however, of a budding romance between these two protagonists, while the book ends with enough. The second book in the series offers further exploration of the dynamic between Maggie and Detective Jackson.
