Bartlett House is a great read.  At times, I found it riveting, and even when it’s not, the writing is still as smooth as silk.

The story begins with a deliberately set fire in an old, abandoned house, in one of the better parts of town.  A body is found, and before long, we meet the prime—though by no means only—suspect: Will Adelhardt, the 20-years-her-senior boyfriend of the victim.  He’s a history professor, twice divorced; a quiet, lonely man.  And while the story doesn’t explicitly rule him out as the murderer, it seems highly unlikely that he’s the guy. 

Friends with both Emmy (the victim), and Will, is Lucy Hidalgo, a freelance journalist who has an inside connection on the police force, and a raft of questions of her own.  The circumstances of Emmy’s death . . . don’t sit well her, nor with Will—they seem very out-of-character for Emmy—and, even through her grief, she starts trying to piece together what happened. 

The story has a lot of texture.  It’s set against a backdrop of modern social justice issues in Portland, Oregon.  Emmy was involved with street youth—which may have had something do with her death; Lucy is involved with workers’ rights movements and unions; Will’s a bit of an old-school Socialist, and that was the context in which he and Emmy first got together; Chris is a lawyer in the Public Defender’s office, and her husband is on the city council.  Issues of poverty and class and money are woven skillfully into the fabric of the story, and we start to wonder just how much these issues were at the heart of the murder.  There are a lot of people directly or peripherally involved in the events, and we meet them through the eyes of the main characters, in the hours and days after the murder.  People start to wonder just how well they know anybody, as details come to light that raise more questions than answers. 

If Bartlett House has any flaws, it’s in its basic structure.  There’s a lot of backstory to be covered, and that necessarily slows things down.  When Will finds out about Emmy’s death, and the scenes that follow during which he’s questioned by the police . . . I couldn’t look away.  I totally lost myself in the fabric of the story—it was exceptionally vivid.  But, because Emmy is now dead, most of what we learn about her is via flashbacks—recalled memories of Will or Lucy.  They are well-handled, but, the flashbacks don’t quite have the life of the main story.

The larger problem occurs when backstory is covered directly, in narrative.  There are long passages where personal backstory is intercut with description of places the character is travelling through, and, because neither the backstory nor the description is tied to anything urgent in the story—or anything a person not familiar with Portland would recognize—the writing just seems to get bogged down in details.  It agitates, rather than moves.  Fortunately, these passages are the exception, not the rule, and they’re easy enough to get past.  In fact, there’s probably a good number of readers out who will straight-out enjoy them.

I think Bartlett House is one of the best web novels out there.  If I found it in a bookstore, I’d pay money for it.  It’s vivid, solid, mature writing, carefully crafted by two writers who know their stuff.  Nothing about the story feels false.  And even though the pacing isn’t quite to my liking, I’m totally hooked.  I’ll be reading it regularly, and I think you should do yourself a favour and check it out.

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