Review: "Out of the Deep I Cry" by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Out of the Deep I Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming
Published 2004 via St. Martin's
★★★

Book 3 in the series sees Clare battling a number of problems: the church roof is leaking in ways that will become catastrophic if not addressed promptly (but with money the church doesn’t have), a local doctor has gone missing not long after a confrontation by a woman convinced that the vaccines he gave her son caused autism, and—Clare finds as she digs deeper into the town’s past—a decades-old unsolved disappearance still haunts the present day.

I enjoy this series and will probably keep reading (eventually and piecemeal), though <i>Out of the Deep I Cry</i> ended up feeling a bit dated to me—the fact that Clare entertains Debba’s anti-vaccine rantings for more than three seconds tells me that the book was written, well, much closer to Wakefield’s (flawed and thoroughly discredited) study than to…now. (Make no mistake—I know full well that people still get fearful about vaccines. But the combination of fear of autism + Clare’s initial reaction put this book in a specific time frame.) I also struggled at times to hold the timelines and the relationships between the different characters steady in my mind, though I got there in the end.

Clare’s relationship with Russ continues to develop, and that’s one of the more genuinely interesting parts of the book—because Russ is married, and although his marriage isn’t perfect, it also can’t be written off as ‘well, his wife is an evil bitch who tricked him into marrying her anyway’ (the sort of thing that shows up a lot in romance novels); that Clare and Ross end up in this morally suspect place is all the more interesting for Clare’s position in the church. I’d want to keep reading for the writing anyway, but the series is so much more interesting to me if they’re actually going to be, you know, flawed humans facing imperfect decisions.