The Muralist by Carrie Hagen

Book review by Diana Morris-Bauer

The city of Philadelphia at once boasts of its early-American history and cringes at its infamy as one of America’s murder capitals. The city’s gloom serves as a contemporary dystopian backdrop while its cultural district attracts international crowds to its world-class museums and street artwork. Perhaps no other element of Philadelphia best captures this dichotomy than its thousands of public murals that rise on gritty street corners, products of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Their color and design command attention, but in their ubiquity, they can also fade into the gray urban landscape, just like the city’s murder victims who fade into numbers on tally sheets. Yet these murals can no longer be ignored when a series of macabre murders features forsaken vicitms staged in sickening tableux, deadly copies of the renowned street art, in the new mystery-thriller The Muralist: Of Matter Deep and Dangerous, by Carrie Hagen. 

Hagen’s engaging investigative team of detectives Eric Ross and Lina Lopez navigate the streets of Philadelphia against the broader backdrop of the omnipresent murals, which serve as touchstones to the city’s contemporary turmoil in which volunteer, civic, and city agencies grapple with “Restorative justice. Suicide Prevention. Environmental abuse. Pet abuse. Domestic abuse. LGBTQIA+ rights. Veterans’ rights. Addiction. . . more?” (101). Hagen brings her murder victims into full relief, just as rookie detective Lopez realizes that a mural emphasizing Philadelphia’s civil rights icons hovers in the background of her favorite KFC stop: “Their faces, names and history loomed larger than life over one of the busiest intersections in the city, but the average passerby was focused on getting from corner to corner, stop to stop, meal to meal” (102). Hagen demands that the reader notice, see, perceive. That they be awed, horrified, appalled.

The thrilling narrative of The Muralist traffics in tension, not only in the satisfaction of a mystery that unfolds within a breathless one-week time frame, but also in the neighborhood friction of gentrification, demographic shift, foster care services, homelessness, and the opioid crisis. Hagen’s Philadelphia is a dark vision “pockmarked by abandoned warehouses and factories, . . . neighborhoods [of] luxury condos and tax-abated townhouses built in industrial ruins” (25). Her characters embody these liminal spaces, enlightening the reader as they plumb the darkness.

Despite the afflictions that earn Philadelphia its bleak reputation, Hagen also captures the city’s trademark scrappy humor in her cadenced police dialogue.  While the detectives block traffic in a squad car, another motorist impatiently honks at the cruiser: “Who the hell honks at a cop?” (20). A Philadelphian, of course. Hagen’s detail is drawn with the intimate ear and eye of someone who knows the trash-talk of Philadelphians and who has walked hundreds of miles exploring the city’s dark alleys, forsaken freight train corridors, as well as the charming, overlooked 17th-century cemeteries. The book embodies a sense of place that is intimate, personal, yet alienating. For the reader who knows Philadelphia, the book generates an exciting familiarity, and for anyone who does not, Hagen’s vivid prose serves as a captivating primer.  

Carrie Hagen’s success with tense narrative in the chilling true-crime book We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping That Changed America transfers deftly to fiction in The Muralist with a sensational bolt of action that creates an exciting, disturbing, and satisfying conclusion. Her complex characterization makes the reader hope that detectives Ross and Lopez will reveal many more personal secrets and dare to confront more civic corruption in volumes to come. There’s certainly no shortage of deep and dangerous matter in Carrie Hagen’s Philadelphia.

Retired after three decades of teaching English at a public high school, Diana Morris-Bauer is giddy to be reading books instead of thousands of students’ compositions.