Connecting With the Winners' Circle

The Winners’ Circle by Gail Bowen - It is not often that tears well up when I read but I found myself choked with emotion more than once while reading The Winner’s Circle. I have connected deeply with sleuth, Joanne Kilbourn, and her family and her friends in the 17 books of the series. Yet I have not often felt so emotional about one of the books.

In the opening of The Winners’ Circle, as set out in my last post, the teenage daughters of major characters call on their parents and spouses to join them in a gathering based on the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration.

To meet and remember resonated with me. You cannot reach my age of 65 without significant loss in your life. Major loss began for me with the death of my mother when I was 29.

For the teenage girls of the book it began earlier. Taylor lost her mother when she was 4. Gracie’s mother died before she became a teenager. Isobel lost a sister as a teenager.

Their goal of healing through “reminiscing and sharing some of the things that have brought their loved ones joy when they were alive” was moving.

Taylor is using, for an art project, Dia de los Muertos decorations to explore “the function of death images in the work of Frida Kahlo.” One of them, a female figure, has “her face framed in delicate paper flowers and her body draped in a gold lame cape”:

“That’s Santa Muerte,” Taylor said. “Sometimes she’s just called Bony Lady. Her followers – and online it says that there are millions of them – believe she’s a saint who will protect them in their lifetime and, when death comes, deliver them safely and lovingly to the afterlife.”

Gracie’s face was grave. “It would be nice to believe in Bony Lady,” she said.

……

I [Joanne] caught Gracie’s eye. “It would be nice to believe in her,” I said.

Halloween evening, when the families meet to share memories, is a special night beautifully described.

Every reader can relate to families struggling for long years with grief. As inevitable there are feelings of guilt among the living over those deaths.

Ultimately Gail skillfully uses an unresolved grief composed of the potent mix of sorrow and anger as the motive for murder.

Many books deal with the stresses intruding upon families of grief but it is Gail’s skill as a writer which makes the experiences of her characters so vividly real.

I know Gail is a woman of faith who lives her Christian beliefs as a member of the Anglican Church of Canada. She has an understanding of the need to take time to celebrate and remember among the living especially when death has been sudden and unexpected.

Reading Gail’s descriptions of her characters, especially the thoughts and observations of the teenage girls, collectively gathering to deal with loss reminded me of personal experiences with death.

I believe in the sharing of memories of the dead. Over the years I have delivered several euologies at the funerals of friends and family. Within our Catholic parish I have presided over prayer services and given reflections at those services. Every time I have spoken about those gone I have felt better for having shared with those in attendance at the funeral or prayer service.

Gail tests her characters on how they grieve later in the book with violent death. Fortunately I have never had to deal such death in real life.

The Winners’ Circle is a good mystery though I have now written two posts about the book that barely touch upon the mystery. Gail’s probing of death and grief in The Winners’ Circle left me grateful I had read the book.

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Bowen, Gail – 2011 Questions and Answers with Gail; 2011 Suggestions for Gail on losing court cases; The author's website is http://www.gailbowen.com/ - (2011) Deadly Appearances; (2013) Murder at the Mendel; The Wandering Soul Murders (Not reviewed); A Colder Kind of Death (Not reviewed); A Killing Spring (Not reviewed); Verdict in Blood (Not reviewed); (2000) - Burying Ariel (Second best fiction of 2000); (2002) - The Glass Coffin; (2004) - The Last Good Day; (2007) – The Endless Knot (Second Best Fiction of 2007); (2008) - The Brutal Heart; (2010) - The Nesting Dolls; (2012) - "B" is for Gail Bowen; (2012) - Kaleidoscope and Q & A on Kaleidoscope; (2013) - The Gifted and Q & A and Comparing with How the Light Gets In; (2015) - 12 Rose Street; Q & A with Gail Bowen on Writing and the Joanne Kilbourn Series; (2016) - What's Left Behind and Heritage Poultry in Saskatchewan Crime Fiction; (2017) - The Winners' Circle; Hardcover