The Shingle Weaver’s Picnic is a 1940s historical murder mystery, following a young girl on a summer visit to family in rural Washington State.
The world of seven-year-old Annie, known as “Cricket,” has been turned upside down by the death of her father at Pearl Harbor. With her mother mourning and expecting a child, Cricket travels alone to spend the summer with her grandparents in Everett, Washington.
She’s a smart, resilient girl, who leans on her faith and Thad, her lawyer grandfather, as she makes sense of the happenings around her. Cricket has good friends in Everett, but trouble is brewing between the town’s teenagers, and old grudges between neighbors are about to surface. What begins as a happy summer of strawberry picking and building forts in the woods, ends in murder, an investigation, and a trial, involving both Cricket and Thad.
Cricket and her extended family are warmly rendered, and Everett’s inhabitants, from the thoughtful sheriff to the town busybody, are well-rounded and believable. Historical details are woven seamlessly into the storyline, and the backdrop of war and loss hovers ominously, but not obtrusively, over the outwardly idyllic summer. Rich, multisensory descriptions and well-crafted dialogue offset some of the drawbacks of long passages of backstory.
Dramatically, however, the novel doesn’t quite deliver. Tragic events are foreshadowed repeatedly, but frustratingly, the promised crisis doesn’t materialize until roughly two-thirds into the novel. Numerous episodes of sexual violence are unnecessarily and shockingly graphic, and the general acceptance of violence against women and children as part of life sits at odds with the novel’s otherwise rose-tinted view of the past.
Additionally, lengthy paragraphs, sometimes pages long, may put off readers, and plotting errors cause confusion, most notably when the doctor’s description of the crime victim’s injuries directly contradict the later explanation of how the crime was committed.
Such flaws aside, the novel successfully evokes the period while offering a strong human-interest story with appealing characters.