I first read The Boy in the Suitcase in late 2011, just a few months before I started writing The Bishop’s Wife in January 2012. I’d been toying with the idea of writing a mystery series based in Mormon, Utah, but at that point, my first attempt had been with a male protagonist and after my editor Juliet read it, she suggested that she’d be more interested in reading about a Mormon woman. What kind of a Mormon woman would be interesting to read about, though? A traditional Mormon housewife seemed unlikely to become involved in solving crimes. I could possibly imagine a Miss Marple kind of older woman who was tangential to the community, but I couldn’t stir much interest in myself in writing it. Nina Borg, the main character of The Boy in the Suitcase, lit up my imagination and fired me to reconsider my assumptions about amateur female detectives, as well as about Mormon housewives and their possible interest to a national audience of mystery readers.

Nina Borg is a Red Cross nurse and a mother of two children, but to offer those two facts about her life is to conflate her (as we so often do to women) to her roles as a server and a carer.danes

Nina Borg is a Red Cross nurse and a mother of two children, but to offer those two facts about her life is to conflate her (as we so often do to women) to her roles as a server and a carer. Nina Borg is herself tired of being conflated to these roles, although they are certainly part of who she is. She rejects more and more as the series moves on the idea that she is only a nurse and a mother, that she is a woman in a traditional role of service provider who keeps herself to herself because she is vulnerable and her children may be in danger if she steps out of her place. It is true that Nina’s inner steel comes out when she sees the plight of those who are even more vulnerable than she and her children are. But the more she digs in, the more the reader realizes that in a way, this is just an excuse. The real Nina was always going to take risks and offer the finger to those in power who dare to step into her sphere. She solves crimes and saves lives, yes. She does this both because she is a mother and a nurse and because she is more than that.

She is the Don Quixote of modern female detectives, a doomed figure who step by step gets closer to the edge of sanity, and yet she is utterly sympathetic even in her most extreme actions.

She is the Don Quixote of modern female detectives, a doomed figure who step by step gets closer to the edge of sanity, and yet she is utterly sympathetic even in her most extreme actions. She is deeply angry, at misogyny, at institutional torpor, at racism, at her own lack of political power, and her anger becomes our anger as readers. We cheer her doing things we would never risk doing ourselves. When she pays the price of enacting her anger, we cringe away a bit and remember that she is doing what we are not.

With Nina as a template, I began to explore a female amateur detective who was Mormon and who had played the role all her life of housewife and stay-at-home mother, who appears to be no more than an appendage to her husband, who is the bishop, but who plays deliberately with everyone’s expectations that she is just a woman trapped in a patriarchal religion. Linda Wallheim has been told all her life that her most important role is as a mother and has embraced this wholeheartedly. But when her children have all left home, Linda is unsure what to do with the rest of her life. Until she sees young girls and women around her who are in danger, and she flings herself into the mix, sure that God has called her to help them, sure that she has trained in mothering to do exactly this. Linda, like Nina, is angry, at the Mormon church, at the men in power around her, at patriarchy in general, at the police and the justice system. Linda does things that are not always sane. She does things that I hope readers wish they could do. And Linda also pays a price for this, as in each book she loses a little bit of the certainty and the devotion to the faith that she might once have said she would give her life for.

Mette Ivie Harrison is the author of numerous books for young adults. She holds a PhD in German literature from Princeton University and is a nationally ranked triathlete. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, she lives in Utah with her husband and five children. She is the author of three novels in the Linda Wallheim mystery series, The Bishop’s WifeHis Right Hand, and the forthcoming For Time and all Eternities.

HARRISON

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