Third time still a charm for Claire Matturo’s Bone Valley

By Donna Decker

Lilly Belle Cleary has solved it again in Bone Valley, the sparkling, witty, third and newest book in Claire Matturo’s mystery novel series set in and around Sarasota, Florida. This time, the intrepid Amazonian quick-witted Lilly takes on major issues such as phosphate mining, fruit libel suits (“in Florida, insulting an orange can land you in court.”), and the plight of the Florida panther. She also embraces personal issues like germ phobias and how to find a good cup of organic java with soy milk in an increasingly Starbucks land.

Lilly is a champion for the small and weaker, even though she masquerades as a defense lawyer who specializes in representing doctors in big bucks malpractice suits. Although Lilly would have us believe she is a hard-core attorney with hard feelings, she defends her eighty-plus year old handyman who is her temporary roommate in a two-bit car accident while her career is five stars. And we see her crazy with worry when against her will, she leaves food cooking on the stove while her granola bar-eating rehabilitating wild blue jay is caught in the house.

I particularly enjoy the legal authenticity Matturo brings to her Lilly Cleary novels. Matturo knows the world of lawyer-dom intimately since she has worked for years as both an appellate attorney and as a member of the writing faculty at FSU’s College of Law. She often has Lilly crack fresh, self-deprecating jokes about her peers and chosen profession: “…gray areas are to lawyers what coastal hurricanes are to rabid surfers.”

Matturo foreshadowed the plot of this book in her previous book in this series, Wildcat Wine, where she briefly describes the shorn Florida terrain as a result of phosphate mining. In Bone Valley, she goes to a whole other level. Here she paints a realistic, horrifying picture of what can happen when the earthen dams, called gyp stacks, that hold the radioactive fluid byproducts of phosphate mining, flood or breach due to catastrophic weather. Against the backdrop of an escalating storm, Lilly Belle must struggle to help save the dams while also rescuing a half-blind panther and various other wild and domestic animals with two other women – a local cat-loving police detective who’s even taller than Lilly’s six feet, and a law partner’s pro-environment wife.

This is after surviving a murder attempt, trying to build a case for her two clients – one dead from a homemade fertilizer bomb, and investigating how an old nemesis/flame wound up dead in a gyp stack. Weave in a bunch of wacky and endearing minor characters, good writing and razor-sharp insights, and you’ve got the making of one heck of a good book. In fact, if it hadn’t been for my drooping eyelids and the wee hours close to sun-up, I believe I have finished this book in one sitting.

Matturo has done a vast amount of research for Bone Valley. Her introduction chronicles the extensive list of works, and the experts to which she referred when writing this book. In addition to immersing herself in the area of phosphate-processing plants and their effect on the ecology of Southwest Florida, she also realistically delves into the subjects of fertilizer bombs, vegan cuisine, rolfing, healing from cancer through prayer, and the day-to-day running of wildlife rehabilitation centers. Matturo’s description of this fictional Southwest Florida wildlife rehab center for injured and orphaned animals is so genuine and similar to our own Chris Beatty’s Florida Wild Mammal Association in Crawfordville, that I felt I had been there before.

Matturo continues to explore several themes and sub-plots that she has touched upon in previous works. In Bone Valley, gorgeous extra-tall Lilly finds herself falling deeper for semi-beloved and sometimes fiancée, criminal defense lawyer, Philip, her colleague and professional equal. That is, maybe. She simultaneously lusts after the rolfer and anti-mining, pro-animal rights model-look-alike, Miguel. We also get more of an insight into her psychological make-up and the reasons for her struggles with intimacy and her bacteria phobia.

Even though Matturo resolves the plot and minor relationships in quirky and fulfilling ways, she doesn’t tie everything up in a neat little package by Bone Valley’s end. This is a quality book that transcends the typical mystery genre, balancing between good story- telling and realism. She gives us a sense of optimism that many folks are challenged to feel in the midst of industrial “progress” and development in our Land of Flowers. By the end of this book, I was reminded of something the famed Everglades photographer, Clyde Butcher, said a few years ago at the Mary Brogan museum. The dialogue between Butcher and his reverent audience about our vanishing natural resources had gone to the point of bleakness. Butcher with his indomitable spirit, looked at us and said, “I have hope. That’s why I do this.”

In Bone Valley, Matturo brings us hope. She has Lilly champion underdogs who fight for the under-voiced in burgeoning Florida. And both author and Lilly lament and hold in hope our dwindling gorgeous land.

Bone Valley
by Claire Hamner Matturo
William Morrow, 2006
$23.95; 316 pages