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Yes, she’s a reporter for a small-town newspaper on Long Island. But she doesn’t just have a nose for news, she can actually smell emotion. And sometimes danger.
Many scenes in The Fingerprint of Destiny mention smells. In the opening scene of the book, Elena approaches a house fire and can smell the fire (of course), but also “human scents of scorched old clothing and furniture and the fetid smell of something dead, rotten.”
Later, at a funeral, “the lobby smelled of aftershave and perfume, of soap and water and something else. … It was relief, perhaps even joy. Death had passed them by.”
I mention this not because Elena’s sense of smell is particularly important to the plot, but because it can give you a sense of how the book is written. Laura Schofer, the author, builds a scene with concrete details, and these blend smoothly into a revelation of the emotional and even spiritual dynamics at work in the scene … which in turn move the plot.
This blending of concrete and spiritual characterizes the book as a whole. The Fingerprint of Destiny is a book with two faces. One face is that of a typical fast-paced mystery / crime drama involving a hard-boiled detective (or, in this case, newspaper woman) who chases down the story, while running from the bad guys, all the while fueled by a substance addiction because she’s near the end of her rope. I’ve read quite a few of those, and Fingerprint is a really well-done addition to the genre.
The other face of Fingerprint is that of an epic tale of that follows generations of strong but ill-fated Latina women, weaving in all kinds of horror, mysticism, superstition, magic and madness. I’m not sure what to call this, but maybe it belongs in the “magical realism” genre. Anyway, I enjoyed those parts very much as well. The fact that Elena is haunted by her grandmothers’ tragic history adds an emotional depth to the book that goes beyond many crime dramas. Nor is it stuck on awkwardly. The history of Elena, her mother, and her mother’s mothers in Venezuela is woven together masterfully with the contemporary mystery unfolding in Long Island.
The writing about Venezuelan culture seems authentic. Schofer, a Latina herself just like her main character, does a great job with the language aspect as well. You don’t need to understand Spanish to read this book, but if you do happen to speak it, you’ll enjoy the few lines of poetry from Cesar Vallejo that a character quotes (then immediately translates), and the few other phrases that get thrown in. Also, when Venezuelan characters speak English, the phrases and grammar sound like those that a Spanish speaker would choose. Very well done.
I do have one problem with the book; namely, I thought that Schofer tipped her hand much too obviously about who the villain was going to turn out to be. I don’t think this was intentional, but in my case, it happened to tip me off, so I did not get to enjoy the shock of “No! Really? It couldn’t be!” that we are meant to experience in the final scenes of such a book. However, just because I figured out who the villain was, did NOT mean that I immediately understood everything that was going on. The book still held some questions, mysteries, and surprises.
I give the book four out of four stars.
***
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