The Wallace Mystery (Little Murder Library #2)

Rick Geary’s latest release is The Wallace Mystery, second in the new line Little Murder Library, following Chester & Grace.

The subject is the 1931 death of Julia Wallace in Liverpool, England. Her head was bashed in, and her insurance agent husband William was arrested. The night of the murder, he was decoyed away from home to an address that didn’t exist. His case presented an interesting legal twist, and Geary has his own suggestion for the guilty party in the end of the book.

As with the previous in the series, this volume walks the line between comic and illustrated text, with large, softly colored panels captioned with facts and detail. There are no word balloons, meaning we don’t see the figures as people or characters. They feel more like evidence or artifacts, pinned for our notice. Given the time passed, they couldn’t be much else.

The Wallace Mystery

Plotwise, there’s not much here — the death, the badly-done investigation, the trial, the results — but if the reader can detach sufficiently from the modern day, Geary, as always, creates a mood that can take one back in time to ponder what actually happened. The case is supposedly famous, although I didn’t find much to recommend it on its own merits, given the lack of notorious features.

The Wallace Mystery was solicited through Kickstarter and is not yet available through the artist’s webstore, although I imagine it will be.



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