Jane Haddam, “Living Witness”

Jane Haddam’s series of mysteries about the affable former FBI agent Gregor Demarkian have given me a lot of pleasure over the years. They’re reliable procedurals shot through with humor and an unusually penetrating eye for social details. Haddam’s dissection of Main Line WASPs is especially observant. But in the last few years, Haddam has become a little bit dyspeptic, inclined to use her novels as soap boxes. Living Witness takes on Christian fundamentalism and the quest to insert creationism into school curricula — which would be fine if she’d kept it as a plot device. Instead, her ire turns the book into a rant. There’s way too much interior monologue, and much of it is repetitive. When she finally gets around to solving the mystery, Haddam’s attention to it seems almost perfunctory. Passion is important, but this is a novel, and Haddam’s indignation overpowers the fiction.