Cozy Bones in ‘The Skeleton Paints a Picture’

A book review starring a sweet skeleton named Sid

Leigh Perry, The Skeleton Paints a Picture. Family Skeleton Mystery #4. Diversion Books, 2017.

I used to look upon reading cozy mysteries as kind of a guilty pleasure. I’m not sure why: residual snobbism perhaps, though why one would consider a dark, gruesome police procedural more elevated than a fun romp through a small community, I have no idea.

Then I started to write mysteries, and that romp through a small community (maybe not as fun as some) showed itself to be quite the exercise.

I’m coming late to the Leigh Perry party, but fear not — all the books are still available and I will romp my way through them.

Leigh Perry, aka Toni L. P. Kelner, is a prolific writer of very funny cozy and paranormal mysteries. As she reports, she has written eleven novels and many short stories under the Kelner name, as well as collaborating with Charlaine Harris on urban fantasy anthologies. In short, she has made her bones (oh, I can’t be the first to make that joke, right?).

I jumped into the middle of the Family Skeleton series because the title under consideration jumped into an online sale — hey, why not?

Sid is the skeleton. He is cool and funny and has a backstory that I’ll learn more about as I move toward the front end of the Skeleton series. Georgia Thackery is the fully human, still alive protagonist, a peripatetic academic, the daughter of two English professors, with a sister and a teenage (as of this book) daughter named Madison.

Sid is fully articulated as well as articulate. He can assemble and disassemble himself. He has mad computer skills and is quite adept at running a snowblower, though he must exercise this talent when live humans (outside the family) are not around.

Georgia has taken an adjunct job at Falstone College of Art and Design, fondly called FAD by its inmates. FAD is located in snowbound western Massachusetts, a few hours from the Thackery family home. Sid gets bored in the family home and mails himself to Georgia, unbeknownst to her. It takes him little persuasion for her to accept his company, what with his cooking skills, movie tastes, lack of need for sleep, and their shared love of sleuthing.

And — what do you know? — an auto accident plunges a car, complete with a body, off a cliff into their back yard early in their stay in Falstone.

The mystery itself is sufficiently compelling and realistic, though as usual with cozies, the violence manages to be both subdued (in its gory details) and over the top: that is, human (and skeletal) responses to the plot dilemmas are kind of, well, extreme. The sleuthing, the skeleton/woman relationship, the pacing, and almost most of all, the academic politics — SOOOOO accurate according to this forty year veteran of such things — are wonderful.

For example, Perry gets the snobbism of competing fields. At her fictional art college, it is ‘sequential art’ (comic books and graphic novels) versus so-called ‘high art’ or ‘real art’ (not comics).

In addition, she captures the frenetic life of so many academic professionals scrambling to get close to a full time salary — not to mention health insurance and retirement benefits. A curious police detective asks Georgia about her job:

“Why don’t colleges hire all permanent professors?”

“Using adjuncts is cheaper. Colleges pay us per course taught and don’t have to pony up for insurance and vacation and all that.”

“And they can get away with working you full time without giving you benefits?”

“The thing is, I only teach three courses at FAD, which puts me under the legal limit for full-time work. To make up the difference in income, I teach two more classes at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Mass.”

“That’s a heck of a long way to commute.”

“It would be if I taught in person — I teach those classes online.”

— The Skeleton Paints a Picture, chapter 7.

Welcome to the capital-efficient world of twenty-first century US academia.

Perry’s style is lively, professional, fluid — not always the case with these cozies, or come on, any genre of fiction — and funny. Georgia is an engaging, unpretentious character, and when she hesitates to dive into a risky investigation (a quality I admire even in brave heroines), Sid’s enthusiasm pushes her onward.

Sid and Georgia are not romantically involved with each other. At one point they get into a struggle over who gets to be the boss in their odd partnership, and Georgia realizes that Sid is right to object to her making rules for his behavior.

“Sid, you’re my best friend. My brother from another mother, my bestie, my wing man, my BFF. What you’re not is my child, but I’ve been giving you orders as if you were Madison.”

— The Skeleton Paints a Picture, chapter 15.

Sid is as appalled at Georgia’s choice of dates as the reader is, and that makes for good reading. A previous boyfriend shows up as a fellow adjunct, which Georgia reveals to Sid as he queries her about her colleagues.

“Who else?” he asked.

“Owen Deen.”

“That name sounds familiar.”

“I taught with him at Lesley, and we went out for a semester.”

“Wait, not Porn Star Owen!”

“He’s not a porn star — he just looks like one. At least his upper lip does.”

“If you’re going to start commenting on his other attributes, I’m going to leave the room.”

“No comment on those,” I said. “It’s just that I still feel guilty for rejecting him over something as superficial as a mustache.”

“Your instincts are good. If he’d been worth keeping around, you would have overlooked the lip caterpillar.”

— The Skeleton Paints a Picture, chapter 6.

A couple of students get involved in unraveling the mystery, centered on theft of intellectual property, and their dialogue and diction ring true, as does their evolving relationship. Very sweet.

There are several layers of bad guys, which I appreciate, and an exciting climax that manages also to be funny. When there’s a walking talking skeleton in the mix, it’s hard to stay serious.

Now I’m going back to the first installment of the Family Skeleton series to see how it all began.

This leads me to one last high point of Perry’s work. Knowing that many readers will plunge into the middle of a series, the author has to figure out how to offer just enough backstory without retelling the first installments or leaving the reader in the dark with inside jokes or muddy references to earlier episodes. I felt perfectly comfortable with these veteran characters and their unique relationship, and yet I was left wanting to know more about how it came to be. A perfect balance on Perry’s part.

So, cozy mysteries? At their best (as with this one), they are not just pleasant, but fun and funny, and just as good a way to spend an afternoon as, say, binging Friends or CSI Miami or, dare I say, Harry Potter. Well, no, not Harry Potter. Harry Potter rules.