Clubbed to Death by Elaine Viets

I've stumbled onto another new series with an intriguing title--A Dead-end Job mystery. The author is Elaine Viets and she claims to have worked all of the jobs featured in the series. Clubbed to Death (2008) is the story of Helen, a divorced woman who quit a lucrative job and moved to Florida after her ex-husband's divorce lawyer proved to be more ruthless, and got the judge to declare that half of her earnings should go to Rob. (This decision was done in spite of the fact that Rob was an unemployed womanizer who had contributed little to the relationship). So Helen changes her last name, finds a cheap apartment and ends up working in the customer care area of a snooty country club, where she deals with cranky, rude rich people all day--and gets to know her coworkers, a rather eccentric lot.

Just when Helen thinks she is getting her new life together--settling into her apartment with her cat, enjoying a romance with Phil, one of her neighbors (and a private investigator)and becoming closer to her landlord, the feisty Margery--Rob shows up. He has married one of the richest women around, whose nickname is The Black Widow--with good reason. Marcella (aka Black Widow) turns out to have "lost" five husbands, all under mysterious circumstances. When Rob shows up, in the parking lot, near Helen's car, she is surprised and angry; he seems nervous and actually has the nerve to ask for her help. He is growing tired of the demands of his much older wife, and now he is afraid he may be on the verge of being "retired." When he reverts to the jerk that he has always been, Helen feels a surge of rage and punches him in the mouth--to his surprise.

Unfortunately, two employees walk up--one is her friend Jessica and the other is Brenda, the hard to please assistant manager. Fighting is grounds for dismissal; however, Rob actually defends Helen and claims he is okay, that it was his fault for scaring her, and asks them not to report it. The next day, however, Rob goes missing--only his bloody shirt is found, and it becomes clear that Brenda did report the incident. Helen is taken in for questioning, arrested, told she has been fired, and sit in jail, bewildered. Then one of the most famous lawyers in the country shows up at the jail and in a matter of minutes arranges for her release and puts her into a limo: he tells her that they are taking a drive to see Marcella.

It turns out that Marcella needs Helen's help, too--Marcella thinks that Rob is dead but that he was up to no good, and she wants Helen to use her contacts at the Superior Country Club to find out what he was doing. Marcella has also discovered that he stole some of her jewelry. Marcella tells Helen that she is confident that Helen did not kill Rob, and that Helen has her job back, with any note of the "incident" expunged from her records. So she goes back to the Customer Care department, and starts searching her coworkers' desks after hours and quietly asking questions.

Reading this book made me think of the worst job I've ever had -- as a telemarketer years and years ago. My daughter, Mikki, was 16 and she and her best friend Desarae decided it was time to get jobs and earn some money; I went along with them, thinking it might be an easy way to supplement my rather meager earnings at the time. I was a single parent and had a couple of summer school classes to teach, but two growing kids needed more clothes, school supplies, and "stuff" each year. We worked that summer together, and it was the only job I've ever had where you had 15 minutes to eat a sandwich, had to plan bathroom trips carefully, and talked to the strangest people over the phone. Making matters worse, there were motivational posters up on the walls. Somehow, they didn't fit with the atmosphere; the computer randomly dialed the numbers, and you had to be prepared to jump into your spiel at the drop of a hat. Then, if you did not do a good enough job of countering the customer's resistance, you might hear the disembodied voice of a supervisor in your headset--"So why didn't you use #34?"

As a college teacher it made me crazy that our scripts were often filled with grammatical errors; I even talked to my boss once about fixing them, for free--and was told solemnly that "the clients want us to say it just like that." We sold products like Death and dismemberment insurance--I remember one man asking, "So how much would I get if I lost a couple of toes and fingers?" I sort of worried about that guy. Others were just rude or gave stupid excuses about why they couldn't talk. We made it a game to collect the cool names of people we called--Elizabeth Taylor, for example. And we commiserated with each other about the rude comments. At the end of the summer, I was more than ready to quit that job--the only one worse than telemarketing would be subbing for 9th grade math classes, but that is a story for another review!

So I could relate with Helen, putting up with cranky customers amd obnoxious bosses. If you are looking for a new series, check out Clubbed to Death. You will find it in the NEW fiction display at the WPL. Earlier books in the series can be found in the Mystery area. You may also be interested in checking out the author's website at http://www.elaineviets.com

c Waterloo Public Library 2008