Unspoken clues
'Wordhunter' so impressive you may want to read it twice (in a row)

After plowing through a summer of lackluster new releases and falling back to my dusty stacks for long gone treasures, we’re now off to the races. I see that autumn and winter releases will bring what promises to be real excitement in our crime fiction genre and hard choices for me to feature only once a month in these pages. So here’s the clear leader in the fall lineup that impressed me so much I read it twice – and I have never read a book, turned back to page one and begun again just to repeat the thrill.

Stella Sands, who has written six well-received true-crime books, has written her first novel, “Wordhunter,” and then probably collapsed. It’s described on the back cover as an “utterly original and compulsively readable detective story about a woman who uses her uncanny ability to analyze word and speech patterns to help solve crimes.” That’s corporate-speak for a dazzling story of subtleties.

We’re all suckers for something, and it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that I have a jones for words. And worse, I used to be absorbed by diagraming sentences, credited to a mother who was an English teacher. She chained me to the kitchen table at a young age to train me to diagram – first in schoolbooks, then snippets of every textbook along the way. Next came novels and articles in magazines trending through our house and even the U.S. Constitution. 

The cover of “Wordhunter” is furnished with diagrammatic lines slanted this way and that, even forming a sketch of a woman’s head. I was hooked just by the concept, then blown over by a wonderfully written and densely simple and nearly perfect story. If “Wordhunter” doesn’t win awards, it will simply be because HarperCollins issued it in paperback, and at 247 pages, it doesn’t conform to the doorstop 500-pagers that seem to be de rigueur. 

So here’s what you need to know about “Wordhunter” to wet your whistle. 

Maggie Moore, 19, is near graduating with an advanced degree from Rosedale University, a downstream college equally unpromising as it’s home in Hyacinth, Fla., “40 miles up CR 187 from the even more inconsequential boondocks of Cypress Havens, population, including Maggie Moore, of 3,598 and dwindled by yet another when Maggie graduates in keenly measured months.”

Maggie is what is not referred to in the story: a savant. She has been studying forensic linguistics. She’s been taught to catalog physical and emotional details of everyone and zero in on word choices, syntax, spelling and unconscious stylistic decisions between consonants in misspelled words. Authorship identification is the goal, and Maggie excels at intuitive observation and is on track to graduate at the top of her class and the pride of Rosedale. 

To quiet her reverberant mind and dissociative ways, Maggie diagrams sentences. Constantly. And not just sentences from textbooks or newspapers, but sentences from Proust, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Dostoevsky, song lyrics – everything. And she does it all the time when she’s not in school, school is boring or she needs to see the logic in rules, regulations and notes pinned to corpses demanding ransom. 

Maggie is such a standout that when the police department in nearby Olemeda calls to see if Rosedale might have someone they’d recommend to analyze notes left on victims of a serial killer, Maggie is recommended. This is just what Maggie chose to specialize in after graduation, and she is over the moon with excitement.

Maggie is paired with Detective Silas Jackson, who personally doesn’t believe in any of this hocus pocus but is dispatched to accompany Maggie by his chief. He has seen a show on the Unabomber and learned that word analysis helped zero in and apprehend him.

Picture where this arrangement might go and double it. I’m not going to give away this magnificent story. It’s so without flaw and overflowing with intrigue, atmosphere and beautiful logic that I couldn’t do it justice other than a quick sketch of Maggie Moore.

Maggie rides a motorbike named Annabelle. Maggie’s tattooed and pierced. She drinks vodka in excess, pops the top on a beer first thing in the morning, smokes cigarettes and knows her drugs. She works in a diner, writes book proposals for her professors and doesn’t suffer fools lightly. In other words, she’s a problem child, but modest and always right. And Maggie is kind until she’s given reason to take revenge. She is simply a wonderful fictional character every novelist will envy. And this book is great, and under no circumstance should it be missed.

Ask Maria’s Bookshop for your 15 percent Murder Ink discount on this $19 book, or ask the library to hold or order a copy for you. And if all that fails, borrow my copy – you absolutely must read “Wordhunter.”