Book Review: Charlotte Illes Is Not A Detective by Katie Siegel

Charlotte Illes is 25 years-old, single and living with her mother in her childhood home. While she’s fine with both her age and her living arrangements, her dating situation is a nightmare, and not just for the reasons usually encountered by 20-somethings in the 21st century. With Googling dates before meeting becoming a de rigeur precaution, Charlotte finds herself inescapably reminded every time she meets someone new of whom she used to be: a celebrated child sleuth who was Frencham, New Jersey’s very own answer to Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown. She even had her own phone line in the garage to take calls from the many people wanting help solving the PG-rated mysteries that plagued them.

In this she was ably assisted by her two best friends, Lucy Ortega and Gabe Reyes, with the occasional helping hand from her older brother Landon. But as she grew older herself, she turned her back on investigating, for reasons still never fully clear to the people who love her. A far more hurtful decision, albeit unintentionally so, was when she started distancing herself from this circle as well. She doesn’t really know how to explain why, or how to get past the fact that she never has a second date after spending her first dates refusing to talk about her storied past.

Part of her reasoning for shutting people out, she reluctantly concedes, is the fact that her present is just wildly unexciting:

What else was there to talk about? How she was recently unemployed? How she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life? How she invented a snack that involved coring an apple and stuffing peanut butter inside, but then stopped making it because the apple corer broke and she didn’t feel like trying to replicate it with a knife? She had spent so much time lamenting that people only seemed to want to talk about her girl detective days and never considered that maybe that was all there was to talk about.

A phone call from Landon jolts her out of her existential ennui. His girlfriend Olivia Kimura has been getting some really weird messages posted to the front door of their apartment. The notes are all romantic and seemingly harmless, but are still borderline stalker material. Charlotte agrees to come visit Landon and Olivia at their Highview apartment, an easy commute away from New York City, where the couple are both ostensibly employed. She’s not going back to being a detective per se, but she is going to look into the matter.

It doesn’t take the skills of a girl genius for Charlotte to quickly figure out who’s been sending the notes. But her presence in Olivia’s life seems to have kicked over a can of worms, as a masked assailant threatens her one night, telling her to go home and keep her nose out of other people’s business. Charlotte quickly deduces that this has something to do with the recent murder of one of Olivia’s co-workers, and that Olivia herself might be at risk if Charlotte doesn’t get to the bottom of things, and quickly. With Landon, Lucy and Gabe once again by her side, Charlotte starts poking around – not detecting, as she’s quick to tell anyone who’ll listen. But she’s not fooling anyone, least of all a person who’s already killed before.

This was an adorable and entirely plausible story of what happens when a child sleuth grows up and decides they want to be anything besides what defined their childhood. Charlotte’s crisis of confidence is familiar to anyone ever deemed a prodigy, even as her self-inflicted estrangement from people she truly cares about rings true to anyone who’s ever suffered from low self-esteem, however temporary. It’s so lovely to see her reunite with her friends and family over the course of her investigations, even when she’s throwing them into the deep end of her probably less than legal efforts at snooping:

“Who am I keeping a lookout for?” Lucy asked, trying to make her voice carry while keeping it at a low volume.

 

“Um, um um um…” Charlotte quickly pulled out her phone and found the text Olivia had sent her with Annette’s description. “‘Curly brown hair, five-foot-five, poor listening and communication skills.’” She paused, looking back down at Lucy. “At least two of those things should be helpful.”

 

“Sure, I’m very familiar with poor listeners.”

 

“Sorry, did you say something?”

 

“Ha. Go.”

The humor throughout made me laugh out loud so many times, especially in the lively banter between Charlotte and her friends. The conversations feel very real, as the friends navigate not just a murder mystery but also the more mundane conundrums of modern life, whether it be dating or roommates or career issues. The main characters all feel like people I want to spend more time with, as I look forward to reading more wildly entertaining installments of this wonderful, queer-friendly series.