“Wordhunter”
Stella Sands
Harper, $18.99
It's a mystery, it's a thriller, and it's all about a fresh-on-the-scene Gen Z protagonist, a linguistic forensics maven, Maggie Moore. She's pierced, tattooed, and on the brilliant side of precocious. Having graduated from high school early and completed college in record time, she's finishing a master's in linguistic forensics at age 21. She smokes, she drinks, she pops pills, and she rides a Kawasaki Vulcan 900. Moon pies and Snickers bars seem to be the staples of her diet as she courts an apparent death wish right alongside ambition in her chosen field.
And then there's the back story. A childhood best friend gone missing as a teenager. A deceased mother. And more. In "Wordhunter" Stella Sands has drawn a protagonist damaged on multiple levels by a tragic past; that past has a serious twist, revealed late in the novel when the clues to the revelation all add up, and presto: Certain personality elements click into place. The narrative deepens with a character-driven propulsion.
At the opening of the novel, Maggie Moore is tapped by a nearby police department for help in apprehending a cyberstalker, and she uses her expertise in linguistic forensic techniques applied to text messages. This leads to her involvement in a separate kidnapping case that includes disturbing language of violence and sexual predation in notes left by the perpetrator.
The case puts her in contact with the "commanding presence" of a broad-shouldered, rattlesnake-belt-wearing, no-nonsense cowboy type, Detective Silas Jackson, who becomes a major player in the narrative as Ms. Sands develops the relationship between the experienced detective and the girl prodigy. There's a sense of ambiguity at work here. The detective is acting . . . rude . . . but also . . . paternal? Yet the relationship is at once combative, flirty-combative, and edging — sort of? — toward romantic.
Readers may bristle, or get the ick, at the disparity in their ages and the implicit power dynamic between a professional cop in his 40s and a 21-year-old student. It's suspect. Isn't it? But the banter is certainly fun.
The novel takes place in the Florida backwater of Cypress Havens. Florida-bashing in colorful prose sets the scene: "Would she ever get used to living in the godforsaken south-central town of Cypress Havens? Why hadn't she left it in all her twenty-one years? Maybe she was suffering from a form of Stockholm syndrome. If it wasn't the crawling bugs, fluttering bugs, swarming bugs, stink bugs, no-see-ums, and kamikazes, it was the in-your-face, ever-present assortment of hustlers, rednecks, pedophiles, and mass murderers — all of whom, she was certain, lived on her block — not to mention the strung-out dropouts high on meth or heroin. . . ."
In junior high school, Maggie Moore was nicknamed "Brainiac Bitch," harbored an early fixation on word use and word choice, and learned sentence diagramming from a zealous seventh-grade teacher who insisted it was the key to success.
"Today's diagramming served a different purpose than it did back then. Today, it was her version of om. No friggin' way she'd ever do yoga."
Let's talk about the sentence diagramming. This unusual coping mechanism appears in the book frequently as actual sentence diagrams make their way into the narrative. Ms. Sands's Maggie Moore diagrams things people say to her. Lines from songs. Lines from films. She diagrams the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison; she diagrams Vonnegut, Austen, Twain. And Proust, she diagrams Proust.
This may seem gimmicky on the surface, but the mechanism reads like a labor of love because the sentences come from the protagonist's point of view, surface in step with or in response to the action, and are linked more to character development than plotting. The sentences are a map of Maggie Moore's mind. They indicate what interests her, and her range, while building credibility for her talent in linguistic forensics (talent that in turn acts to push the plot).
For some readers, this literary acumen in one so very young may strain — her tattoos are of famous last lines of novels, from Gordimer to Hemingway — and her compulsive sentence diagramming is a little hard to follow when it comes to Proust, unless the reader is as on top of her Proust game as Maggie Moore.
She's a lot, this Maggie Moore, but her creator, Stella Sands, generates plenty of sympathy for her young, tough, brave, brilliant but reckless, driven but self-defeating character. Ms. Sands further covers her bases with a well-developed, compelling back story that not only builds the Maggie Moore character but builds the world of the narrative she inhabits, Florida-gritty and full of people on both sides of bad luck.
The grammar of the book, which is to say its internal consistency, checks out.
Evan Harris is a librarian and writer who lives in East Hampton.
Stella Sands is the author of a half dozen true-crime books. She lives in Sag Harbor.