And yet, despite putting down a series because it was too dark for me, I somehow ended up reading noir and liking it? I genuinely don’t understand what happened there, and this is going to be a frustrating entry, because I quite enjoyed Margaret Millar’s Vanish in an Instant and I can’t be nearly as specific about why.
I came across a blurb for Millar’s The Listening Walls last fall and thought it sounded interesting, being in a mystery mood at the time. It’s a very time-and-place mystery, about an American woman on vacation in 1950s Mexico; her traveling companion dies, and she … just doesn’t come back. I found it a little chilly but twisty, tight, and astute, and I was glad to discover an acclaimed writer with a big and readily-available back catalog.
I have no idea why I landed on Millar while scrolling and scrolling my list of unread books; I do know that I picked Vanish in an Instant at random. In this one, a woman is arrested for the murder of her presumed lover after being found blackout drunk and covered in blood near his body. We mostly follow her lawyer as he attempts to determine what happened.
On the basis of two books I am declaring Millar a writer who I find compelling while feeling surprised about it. She randomly head-hops, Vanish includes an entirely unconvincing romance, arguably she doesn’t always play fair in the way she presents the third-person POVs … but her atmosphere and the complexity of her characters just pull me in, and the stories feel very well-constructed though in a slightly claustrophobic way.