"Another sly tale from Stuart"

Anne Stuart delights in using her magical powers of prose. A lady wizard, she takes a setting, characters and a plot, and gives us amazing stories that mesmerises us, enthralls us. But she is not content to do the Hat Trick time after time. She loves to pick out a hero - an anti-hero - and show us she can make us love someone we'd ordinarily shun. She's pushed us into dancing in the fire with an assassin, a mercenary, convicted murderers, a mad wizard, a conjurer of Black Arts who converses with a dead priest, men who spent time in jail, a cult leader, a man supposedly dead, and countless unrepentant rogues. This time she decided to make us adore a man who is both a murderer and crazy. And as usual, she achieves the aim she set out to do. We mere mortals can just sit back enjoy the fireworks and smile!

CRAZY LIKE A FOX is another dazzling display of Stuart's genius. I'd like to know what she eats, because no writer on the market today writes with the same solid consistency for decades, and yet, each time the book is so special, so original.

For this one, Stuart goes south to Louisiana. It's a Southern Gothic that revels in the Faulkneresque peculiarities of post antebellum south. Somehow, the years are not so distant in the south, traditions are strong, family, even extended family, means so much. But Margaret Jaffrey, a woman raised above the Mason-Dixon Line is unprepared for the brooding mansion and the oddball family ruled with a strong fist by her grandmother by marriage. However, out of a job and down to her last dollar, she has no choice but to accept the offer from her in-laws to take in her 9-year-old daughter and her. Gertrude, who prefers to be called grand-mere, holds court in the Deveraux- Jeffery Clan. There is Uncle Remy, the lovable lush. Aunt Eustacia, the fading ghost of a Southern Belle. Her daughter Lisette, the spiteful, sluttish daughter coming out of her second marriage. Wendell, the ne'er-do-well attorney. And one mustn't forget Gertrude's grandson, Peter, locked in the attic in great Gothic tradition.

Peter's wife was killed two years ago. Someone strangled her and tried to burn down the building she was in to cover the crime. Peter was arrested, convicted for the murder while protesting his innocence. Later, the conviction was overturned with a verdict of not-guilty-by-reason-of- insanity. He was supposed to be confined to a mental insinuation, but in old Southern Tradition ala Boo Radley, the family arranged that Peter spends his days confined to the attic.

Margaret is unused to this close family togetherness, unused to the while they are being ever so genteel, they're sharpening knives to stab each other in the back. While she plots for a way to escape this bizarre lifestyle, her daughter quickly comes to love her great-grandmother, great- uncle Remy, and especially mad Peter in the attic. At first, she is stunned by the family's casual acceptance of Peter's "condition", the scurrying to put out cigarettes or hide lighters from Peter when he enters a room, or the frantic dive to turn off music on a radio fearful of setting him off in another "spell". However, despite assurances from everyone that Peter is insane - well, he only killed his wife, everyone else is safe are they not? Margaret falls under the spell of the troubled man and soon comes to suspect Peter is not as he pretends.

Toss in a night of romance on Mardi Gras, Stuart with her sly humor, once again, serves up something as filling as a Po Boy Sandwich and as tempting as fresh beignets on a sleepy New Orleans morn. It's just does not get any better than this!

Reviewed by DeborahAnne MacGillivray
Posted August 17, 2004