A & E

Cornelia Read was a dotcom refugee, having caught the last wave of the cyberspace revolution before being summarily cast adrift in 2001. Living in Berkeley, Calif., married and the mother of twin girls, one of whom is autistic, she "camped out" on Craigslist, the Internet site that features free classified ads, looking for work.

She had no luck on the job front, but Read did find an ad looking for participants for a mystery-writing group.

"I thought about it, and everything I had enjoyed reading in the last 10 years had been mysteries," Read says.

Five years later, Read has joined the fraternity of writers -- notably Alan Furst, Laura Lippman, Lee Child, Ayelet Waldman and the late Jim Thompson -- who inspired her. "Field of Darkness," her debut, is a most unusual entree into the mystery genre. Madeleine Dare, a young journalist living in Syracuse, N.Y., comes from a rich, longstanding Long Island family that traces its history to the Mayflower. Her husband, Dean, works on a Canadian railroad, and is frequently absent from home, which gives her more time to investigate a cold case: the deaths of two young women in 1969 who just might have been murdered by their cousin, Lapthorne Townsend.

Madeleine's character, Read admits, is based on her own life experiences. Born in New York City in 1963, she lived on Long Island before moving to Carmel, Calif., with her mother when her parents divorced. Her early childhood was marked by all the vestiges of a privileged life, save the money. When her mother put her on airplanes to visit her grandparents, she'd be dressed in an R. Crumb T-shirt and tie-dyed jeans. Her grandparents would take one look at her and buy her tassel loafers and kilts.

"We were so broke, they ended up buying my school clothes," she says. "Nobody would sit next to me on the school bus; they just thought I was so weird."

When she began to attend a boarding school -- The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. -- after her freshman year of high school, Read was surprised by how she was suddenly accepted. All the schoolyard pettiness, the "tyranny of having the right jeans," was absent in her new surroundings, the supposed egalitarianism of boarding school a myth.

Her own family was a different matter, especially the branch that she calls the Dead White Bad Guys.

"I really started to run across a lot of ancestors in American history classes in high school," she says. "It seems like every time there was somebody truly evil, it would be a relative."

Among those forebears was Capt. John Underhill, who in 1637 massacred 1,000 Pequot Indians, including women and children, in Connecticut, then published a pamphlet about how easy it was to kill so many people. Other ancestors were anti-Semitic. Her home life in California, in contrast, included hanging out with Black Panthers, attending anti-war marches and donating food to striking farm workers.

"My first stepfather was into radical politics, and I was raised on that," Read says. "To go back and see people who were still literally saying things like 'Hitler had the right idea' was appalling to me."

The plot of "Field of Darkness" is loosely based on a true story. Years ago, Read's father-in-law told her about the double murder of two young women whose bodies were found in his neighbor's field in upstate New York in the late 1960s. The pair were last seen at a state fair with two young soldiers; years after the deaths, her father-in-law found a pair of dog tags in the same field where the women had been found.

Read changed some aspects of the crime and notes that the action in the novel takes place 19 years after the fictional murders.

"That turned out to be tremendously lucky from the point of fiction," she says. "There was no e-mail, there were no cell phones, and certainly a lot of things that happen in terms of Madeleine not being able to get in touch with her husband when he's in Canada -- were that to happen today, it would not be the case she couldn't find him. I lucked out, but it was not something I thought I'd better do."

Read is currently working on her second book, set in the Berkshires of New York and once again featuring Madeleine Dare. While she's aware that series fiction often becomes stale, Read is optimistic that her character has some adventures left in her.

"She's so much my doppelganger, I hope so," she says, laughing. "If it's over for Madeleine, I guess I should go down and lie on the train tracks now. It will be interesting to see how long it can last as a series. As Ayelet (Waldman) says, you do run the risk of Cabot Cove syndrome, like Jessica Fletcher, the amateur sleuth (from 'Murder, She Wrote'), who keeps stumbling across dead bodies. It's pretty difficult to maintain suspension of disbelief. It probably strains credulity to the point where only dogs can hear it."

Capsule Review

In her debut, "A Field of Darkness," Cornelia Read snaps off one-liners like a modern-day Philip Marlowe. An outfit worn by her character, journalist-turned-sleuth Madeleine Dare, is "sardonic Moroccan" when put together, but winds up being "full-on Sgt. Pepper doorman." The German language is like "dozens of steamer trunks falling down stairs." A retired cop and his girlfriend are "Ozark Fonzie" and "Vomit Girl."

Amid the effortlessly glib one-liners is a story well told. Discerning readers will have a pretty good idea who committed the crime, the murders of two young girls at a New York state fair in 1969, almost two decades before the action in the novel takes place. But Read's novel brims with verve and vitality; in this case, knowing the outcome doesn't ruin the ride.

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