Mother Daughter Murder Night

Beth, early thirties, and Jack, 15, are both primary characters, but they remain relatively static throughout the novel. Beth’s two major challenges in the novel are to make peace with her mother and to keep her daughter safe. Beth rejects her mother for two main reasons. First, she feels Lana has rejected her. Her mother wanted her to abort Jack, and she did not provide meaningful assistance during Jack’s first year. Second, she feels that her mother is too motivated by status. For most of her adult life, she never tries to understand why her mother may have felt this way. Instead, she just assumes it is because Lana has a shallow character. Eventually, she starts to understand the challenges her mother faced and continues to face, and she becomes more amenable to her. 

Beth and Jack largely have a kind and respectful relationship. As the novel opens, Beth has started to consider that Jack will move away as she grows up, and she prematurely mourns the loss of their close relationship. There are two major tensions that arise in their relationship in the novel. The first is that Jack wants to continue to go to work and help with the investigation while her mother wants to keep her safe. However, Jack wins most of these battles and is able to go to work and help her grandmother find the murderer. The other major tension is the jealousy that Beth experiences when she sees her mother bond with her daughter. Because Beth does not have a close relationship with her mother, she is jealous of the relationship her daughter is able to establish with Lana.

While Jack remains relatively static, she has a couple of defining characteristics. First, she is responsible. Despite being the youngest person to work at the Kayak Shack, she is well-respected there, and everybody trusts her to do her job well. She knows the water and the land because she has spent so much time on the water, exploring. Second, she is brave. She knows that it could be hard to get back on the water after finding the dead body, so she is adamant that she get back on the water right away. She does not shy away from danger, and she goes out on her own to try to figure out where the channels lead.

Jack ultimately helps catch the murderer and becomes a point of connection between Lana and Beth instead of being a point of contention, as she was when the novel began.

Diana and Martin are Hal Rhoads’s two children. Diana’s main characteristic is her style. She is a very wealthy woman who is committed to fashion and putting on a good front. Her first fiancé died, and she wants to keep that a secret because she does not want people looking to her as the possible murderer. She wants the Rhoads property to build a wellness spa, and she believes her father would have wanted the same thing. She is initially a suspect in Lana’s eyes because of her desire for the land. When she finds out her father’s plans for the land, she works to incorporate both her own ideas for the land and her father’s so that both of their wishes can be fulfilled. 

Martin is Hal’s son, and he is the one who murders both Ricardo and Hal. While he wanted to sell the Rhoads property to help him fund a startup, that was not his motive for murder. He murdered both people because he was jealous of their relationship. When he was young, Martin accidentally started a barn fire that killed his mother, Ricardo’s father, and some other people. Hal helped him cover up his involvement in the fire, but he told his son he would never forgive him. Eventually, Hal treated Ricardo more as a son than he treated Martin as one. When Martin learned that the two were planning a joint venture, he killed them. Martin’s character demonstrates what can happen when families break apart and the pain that can come from familial betrayal.

Detective Nicoletti symbolizes bad and possibly abusive police work, highlighting the theme of Abuse of Power in Law Enforcement. His primary personality trait is his arrogance. He believes he knows more than everybody else, and he refuses to listen to anybody else’s ideas. This proves detrimental to the murder investigation because once he believes Paul is the murderer, he will not listen to any other evidence, nor will he pursue any other avenues. His abusive demeanor is shown when he interviews Jack after the murder. He accuses her of drinking at work and of being promiscuous. 

Detective Ramirez is the first Latina detective in the county to be put on a murder investigation. Because of this, she wants to be taken seriously, and she does not work with Lana to the extent that would be helpful to the investigation. She is stymied because she must follow Nicoletti’s orders. She garners Lana’s respect, however, and because of this, Lana starts trying to get evidence so that Ramirez can solve the mystery. Ultimately, she is the one who shows up at the Rhoads property and arrests Martin, leading her to get promoted at the end of the novel. Her gender and race prove a hindrance to her professional development, and her way of overcoming this is by dressing outlandishly so that people cannot ignore her. In this way, she represents the obstacles that some people have to overcome on the way to professional success.