Ellen Crosby's Multiple Exposure

 

                

                                                            By Margaret S. Hamilton    

 

Multiple exposure: the superimposition of two or more individual exposures to create a single photograph. The technique can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects that were not originally there to a scene. It is frequently used in photographic hoaxes. (epigraph)

 

Sophie Medina, the amateur sleuth protagonist of Multiple Exposure, is an intrepid photojournalist who travels the world on assignment. Published in 2013, this is the first in a series about Sophie’s adventures. Ghost Image was published in 2015. Both have been re-issued with the third book scheduled for 2023 publication.

 

In Multiple Exposure, Sophie returns to the North London home she shares with her geophysicist husband, Nick Canning. Nick has vanished, possibly abducted. Sophie sees the blood stains in Nick’s car, left in an Italian forest, but doesn’t give up hope that Nick is still alive. She believes his disappearance is probably related to his “other” job as a covert CIA operative. After several months, she moves to Washington, D.C. and finds a new job.

 

Two sources in the intelligence community tell her Nick is a suspect in several murders. An assignment photographing recently located Faberge eggs leads Sophie into another investigation involving a senator and a Russian oligarch. Sophie is harassed, stalked, and threatened, her apartment searched.

 

With the assistance of an old friend, Sophie digs deeper in the murky circumstances of a cold case murder and separately, important geological documents Nick may still have, particularly when she receives an incriminating photograph from an unidentified sender:

 

Taken with a telephoto lens, it was a crowd shot of a bustling commercial district along a lake or river, a busy outdoor café next to a small marina, the bistro tables filled with patrons enjoying a meal or an aperitif at sunset. A male figure in the middle of the crowd caught my attention and I squinted at him. Dark blond uncombed hair, a scruffy beard; he wore faded jeans and a rough-looking leather jacket. The way he stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, the slope of his broad shoulders, the way his straight hair fell across his forehead like it always did when he didn’t bother with hair gel. The beard was a surprise and so was the hair color, but it was Nick. (p.163)

 

Or maybe a multiple exposure? Sophie suspects the later.

 

I’m familiar with many of the settings in Multiple Exposure, including the National Gallery and adjacent Mall; the Dupont Circle neighborhood; Hillwood House; and Georgetown. Sophie meets her CIA contact in Meridian Hill Park, which she describes from a photographer’s perspective:

 

Its centerpiece was a dramatic waterfall of thirteen linked basins that cascaded down a steep slope. Symmetrical staircases of honey-colored stone flanked the waterfall and led to a grand terrace on the upper level. The lower level was dominated by an enormous reflecting pool whose waters caught the swirling greens of the oak trees that anchored each corner and the brilliant blue of the cloudless sky. (p.215)

 

Sophie Medina is a credible amateur sleuth, tooling around DC on her mint green Vespa. Her well-connected friends supply her with valuable information, which, coupled with her well-honed instinct for survival, makes her an engaging and brave young woman. In many ways, Ellen Crosby’s series is a successor to the popular Helen MacInnes thrillers of the sixties and seventies. Crosby’s details of place and setting are accurate, and enhance, but don’t over-burden the narrative with pages of “guidebook” descriptions.

 

Readers, do you enjoy learning about new settings or visiting familiar settings on the page? Writers, how do you create a setting from your character’s perspective?

 

Ellen Crosby also writes the Wine Country Mysteries set in Virginia.

Photos: copyright Margaret Hamilton Turkevich

U.S. Capitol

Georgetown

Eastern Market

Meridian Hill Park

National Gallery fountain

Hillwood House

Hillwood House exterior and Japanese Garden