Review of Blunt Instrument (Dell Chandler #1) by Amy Bloom

I love Amy Bloom's books, but her first foray into mystery writing left me wanting more character development and more resolutions. I love a woman PI, unorthodox investigative methods, and a darkly playful tone, but I ultimately wanted a longer book that let me dig further into Bloom's academia-adjacent world and its secrets.

Amy Bloom is the author of one of my favorite historical fiction novels (see below), but she is no stranger to writing in varied genres.

In Blunt Instrument, she dives into mysteries, offering a private investigator whose father's past association with Cromwell University leads to her hiring. A prickly professor has turned up dead (his head crushed by a bronze bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and self-taught PI Dell Chandler uses her unorthodox approaches to try to determine which of the tenure-desperate, self-satisfied, resentful, overconfident, entitled, or simpering suspects--many of whom are academics who are dissatisfied with their lots--is responsible.

I'm a big fan of a woman PI using unorthodox methods to solve a case, and Bloom offers that setup here. I love an academic setting, and I also enjoy a conflict between renegade justice-seekers and law enforcement. Dell faces earth-shattering personal revelations in the book, and I loved that.

But I wish that this book were longer and that the pacing were easier to latch onto. The romance element seemed to happen too quickly; it felt rushed and therefore not particularly believable to me. One crime leads to another crime, and the first crime is largely abandoned--along with the university's president and Dell's boss, who disappears after a seemingly significant introduction, until she reappears at the very end of the book wondering why she never received any updates on the case.

Dell's piecing together of the factors that lead to various crimes felt largely abrupt and too easy. Some of her determinations were figured out out of the reader's view, so that we missed Dell's train of thought and realizations, and so that the limited Big Reveals felt jarring. I wished for more exporation of Dell's own background as an academic and I would have appreciated more character development all around. Bloom set up promising scenarios for rich depth, introduced dichotomies (for example, Dell generally loves men and leaves them but she is also a hopeless romantic), then backed off somewhat.

Perhaps my biggest issue with the novel is that multiple loops weren't closed. I wondered if I somehow missed the resolution of various mysteries (who cut the brakes, who threw the rock through the window, who are the definitive killers), but Bloom leaves these somewhat or completely dangling.

Yet I love Amy Bloom's writing, her voice, and her characters. I'm up for reading all of her books. I'm hoping that subsequent Dell Chandler mysteries will offer more elements I found myself hoping for here.

I received an audiobook version of this title courtesy of Libro.fm and Highbridge Company, and I received a prepublication electronic version of this book courtesy of NetGalley and Penzler Publishers: The Mysterious Press.

More Amy Bloom Works

Bloom is also the author of White Houses, which I gave 5 Bossy stars, the heartbreakingly beautiful In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, I'll Be Right Here, Away, Lucky Us, Come to Me: Stories, and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories.