Ludicrous Love Stories

One of my favorite parts of a mystery novel is the love story inevitably woven into all of the dark intrigue and drama. Almost every mystery that I have read has some sort of passionate affair in it’s pages. Everyone knows that sex sells, and adding a love story to a juicy mystery helps to make the characters more three dimensional. As a general rule, most people want to read about characters that are interesting and likeable. There is nothing particularly unique or dynamic about a detective who only thinks about solving the case. But once you make that detective a divorcee who is afraid of getting hurt again, and throw in an attractive love interest with a dark secret, you instantly have richer characters and a more propelling plot line.

            Sometimes however, the love stories within a mystery are so ludicrous that they ruin the rest of the story. I recently read one such mystery, called The Bride Collector by Ted Dekker. This novel is about a serial killer who murders beautiful women, drains them of their blood and glues them to a wall. The FBI has been unsuccessfully trying to solve these murders with no trace evidence. Abruptly, a lead takes the head detective to a residential facility especially for people who are exceptionally smart, but who have severe psychiatric disorders. The detective enlists the help of four of these individuals in solving the case, and they are able to make a lot of progress and see patterns that the police are unable to find.

            However, the lead detective begins to fall in love with one of his helpers in the psychiatric ward. This is where the story takes a sharp turn into unrealistic garbage. An accomplished FBI agent with commitment problems has fallen in love with a young woman who has severe agoraphobia, delusions and schizophrenia. She has been in the mental facility for seven years, and has no intentions of leaving.            

            I don’t mean to imply that mentally ill people do not deserve to be in loving romantic relationships. But the fact of the matter is, that if someone has such severe psychiatric problems that they are unable to cope with the demands of mainstream society, and as a result reside in a mental health facility, then perhaps they are not ready to be in a romantic relationship until they have their medical issues under control.

            Dekker makes a valiant effort to ease the reader into this relationship, and justify it by drilling into the readers head that loving a man is good for the mentally ill woman’s health. But at the end of the day, this was not a relationship that I, as a reader, found to be at all believable, and because this relationship was such a focal point in the novel, it really ruined the fun of it for me.