![]() ![]() Even a cursory autopsy would have revealed the elevated lead levels, since lead is specifically looked for in child deaths. ![]() It’s not spoiling the central mystery to say that a hundred pages later, Lena learns the baby was poisoned with lead, cadmium and potassium dichromate. This is a good hook, except that retrospectively it makes no sense. The medical examiner ruled it a SIDS death - there was “nothing in the autopsy” - but the mother, who thought she heard someone in her house on the night the baby died, is convinced her child was murdered. ![]() Her protagonist is Lena Dawson, a fingerprint expert in a crime lab in Syracuse, and the novel opens with a confrontation between Lena and a grieving mother whose baby died five weeks previously. With her third novel, “Origin,” she tries her hand at a thriller, leaving behind the casual culture of students and cafes to venture into the workaday world of crime labs and detectives. Set in the warmth and light of Southern California and told in tactile and olfactory prose, it was grounded on two subjects she obviously knew well: Arab-American communities and cooking. Diana Abu-Jaber’s second novel, “Crescent,” was a love story involving an Iraqi-American cook and an exiled Iraqi professor, in which Abu-Jaber made pleasing use of the elements of literary romance: a heroine and her nemesis, a talismanic object, delayed revelations. ![]()
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