Size 12 Is Not Fat

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The girl in the shaft
2. Two girls, one missing key
3. The Pansy Ball
4. The bomb
5. Rachel
6. What works and what creaks
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

The first thing Heather Wells does in Size 12 Is Not Fat is try on a pair of jeans. She is in a fitting room, squeezed into denim, listening to a size-zero stranger argue with a clerk about vanity sizing. Heather is twenty-eight, a size 12, and a former teen pop star who once had her face on the wall of every middle school in America. Now she is on her hands and knees in a dressing room, trying to figure out whether she has actually dropped two sizes or whether the jeans are lying to her.

Then her phone rings. It is her boss at Fischer Hall, the residence hall at New York College where Heather works as assistant director. A student has been found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

That juxtaposition is the whole book in miniature. Heather's life has shrunk from arenas and mall appearances to a $23,500-a-year job handling broken soda machines, drunk freshmen, and the occasional corpse. She is not thrilled about it, but she is not self-pitying either. She is funny, nosy, and stubborn, and she has a theory about elevator surfing: girls do not do it. Especially not preppie girls who like Ziggy cartoons and are terrified of heights.

Meg Cabot published this first Heather Wells mystery in 2005 through Avon Books. It runs 368 pages, and it is very much a product of its moment: chick lit with a body count, a first-person voice that wisecracks through grief, and chapter headings made of lyrics from Heather's old albums. The mystery is not the point, exactly. The point is Heather, and whether a woman who lost her career, her money, and her fiancé can build a life that fits her.

The girl in the shaft

Elizabeth Kellogg was a freshman from Mystic, Connecticut, who wanted to be a nurse. She lived on the fourteenth floor of Fischer Hall with her roommate, Marnie Villa Delgado, an acting student who spends most of the book smoking and angling for a single room. Elizabeth's mother is convinced her daughter was pushed. The college and the police are equally convinced she was elevator surfing, a stunt in which students ride on top of elevator cars. The coroner says Elizabeth died on impact, probably twelve hours before anyone found her.

Heather's objection is simple and, to her, unanswerable: the kids who elevator surf are usually drunk boys in packs. Elizabeth was alone, sober, and cautious. Her ID was in her pocket. Nobody reported seeing her fall. The elevator door key, which staff are supposed to sign out, is missing from the cabinet. By the time Heather brings Detective Canavan over to look, the key has been put back.

Canavan is a cigar-chewing NYPD detective who recognizes Heather from her "Sugar Rush" poster and treats her like a minor nuisance. He has real crimes to deal with. Heather has a hunch and a missing key, and she keeps pushing.

Cabot gives us Heather's backstory in quick, bitter strokes. She was a teenage sensation on Cartwright Records, the label run by her fiancé's father. She wanted to sing her own songs, the label said no, and her career ended. Her mother and manager ran off to Argentina with her savings. Her fiancé, Jordan Cartwright of the boy band Easy Street, was caught cheating with Tania Trace, the newer, thinner pop star. Heather moved into the attic apartment of Jordan's older brother, Cooper, a private investigator, in exchange for doing his billing.

Cooper is the other engine of the book. He is competent, blunt, and kind in a way he would deny. Heather is in love with him and convinced he prefers women like Rachel Walcott, her boss: Yale-educated, size two, precise, and relentlessly put together. Rachel is the one who calls Heather about Elizabeth's death. She is also, in the way of these books, a little too perfect to be trustworthy.

Two girls, one missing key

Two weeks later, a second freshman dies the same way. Roberta Pace, called Bobby, was afraid of heights. Her roommate, Lakeisha, says Bobby had just met a guy at a dorm dance, a tall white student who lived in the building and never had to sign in. Bobby was happy, not suicidal. She was also dead at the bottom of the shaft.

This time Heather calls Cooper before she calls anyone else. He agrees to help, though he has a theory of his own: Heather misses the adrenaline of performing and has found a replacement in amateur detection. That accusation stings because it might be partly true. Cooper's skepticism is useful, though. He asks the questions Heather forgets, like whether Elizabeth's roommate might have spent the night elsewhere, and whether a guest could have signed in.

They search Elizabeth's room and find a condom in her desk. Elizabeth, according to Marnie, had never even kissed a boy until a week or two before she died. Then she met someone and became giddy. Roberta's file contains a note from her mother complaining about a roommate situation. Elizabeth's file contains a similar note from her mother about guest privileges. Both mothers supposedly called Rachel. Both girls had recently acquired a boyfriend. Both died in the same shaft.

Heather's suspect is Christopher Allington, the college president's son. Chris is a law student who hangs around the undergraduate residence hall, chatting up freshmen. He introduces himself to one girl as Dave. He is handsome, rich, and slippery, and Heather catches him at a dorm talent show with his arm around a girl named Amber. Heather warns Amber off in a scene that is half detective work and half maternal panic.

The Jordan problem keeps interrupting. He shows up at Cooper's brownstone, wanting Heather back, and she sleeps with him. It is a mistake, and she knows it while it is happening. The next morning the Post prints a photo of them kissing on Cooper's doorstep. Cooper sees it. Heather tries to pass it off as a good-bye kiss. Nobody believes her, least of all Heather.

Then a heavy planter falls from the roof of Fischer Hall and hits Jordan in the head. He had been standing outside with Heather. A witness says the planter was aimed at her; Jordan was hit because he was beside her. He survives, but the message is clear. Whoever killed Elizabeth and Roberta now wants Heather dead too.

The Pansy Ball

Rachel is nominated for a Pansy, the college's flower-shaped award for staff who go above and beyond. The award ceremony gives Cabot a chance to put everyone in formal clothes and let Heather pretend, for one evening, that Cooper is her date rather than her bodyguard. She borrows a red Armani dress from her friend Patty, who is married to a rock star and has a closet full of things Heather can almost fit into.

At the ball, Rachel looks stunning in midnight-blue silk. Heather, in the borrowed dress, feels like a sausage. Cooper cleans up better than she expected and spends much of the evening talking to Marian Braithwaite, an art history professor and an ex-girlfriend. Heather is jealous, distracted, and trying to work.

She dances with Chris Allington and tells him that the two dead girls were the ones he had slept with. His reaction is not guilt. It is horror and confusion. He did not know their real names. He had been calling them by nicknames, or maybe he had been calling himself by a fake name; either way, the man is a serial dater who does not bother to learn much about the women he beds. Heather realizes he is not the killer. He is just a cad.

Cooper, meanwhile, has been talking to a friend in the coroner's office. The dead girls had burns on their bodies, small electrical burns that nobody had explained. A stun gun. Someone incapacitated them, then pushed them down the shaft.

Heather visits the Allingtons' penthouse and gets a red herring for her trouble. Mrs. Allington is drunk, surrounded by screaming cockatoos, and mistakes Heather for Justine, the previous assistant director. She says the girls are always chasing Chris, causing trouble. It is nasty and sad, and it points Heather toward a mother protecting her son. It is also wrong.

The bomb

The next morning someone calls the reception desk to report that Gavin McGoren, a junior film major and repeat elevator surfer, is at it again. Heather rides the service elevator with Julio, a janitor, to chase him down. She climbs onto the roof of the car. Gavin is not there. Then a pipe bomb goes off beneath her feet.

The explosion shreds the service car and sends it falling down the shaft. Heather catches a steel cable and hangs there, hands sliced open, while the car crumples below. Julio is badly injured. Cooper, who has been out running, arrives and talks her onto the roof of the adjacent elevator. It is the closest the book comes to straight action, and Cabot writes it with the same chatty interior monologue Heather uses for everything else. She thinks about Pringles while she dangles over a twenty-story drop.

At the hospital, Detective Canavan admits that someone tried to kill her. Chris Allington has an alibi: he left town for his parents' house in the Hamptons the night before. The bomb required someone with access to the building and some technical knowledge. Heather has neither, but Rachel has both.

The clues come together through paperwork. Justine, the fired assistant director, left behind files. The files show that Elizabeth's and Roberta's mothers had called Rachel to complain, which gave Rachel an excuse to meet with the girls alone. Heather later realizes those calls never happened. Rachel invented them to explain why she kept summoning the victims to her office.

Cooper accesses the college's student information system and pulls Chris's record. Chris spent time at Earlcrest College, where his father was president. The residence hall director at Earlcrest was Rachel Walcott. She was older than Chris, in her thirties, and she had been involved with him. When he dumped her, she threw his computer monitor across the quad. Then she remade herself: lost weight, changed her hair, bought new clothes, and got a job running the building where his parents lived.

Heather and Cooper drive to the Hamptons to interview Chris. He is lounging by a hot tub with a girl named Hope when they arrive. He confirms the affair. Rachel was the first woman who had ever wanted him, he says, or at least the first who made him feel chosen. He ended it because he was graduating and did not see a future. She did not take it well. He had no idea she had followed him to New York College until he walked into Fischer Hall and saw her, thin and polished, behind the reception desk.

Chris also confirms that he slept with Elizabeth and Roberta. He did not kill them. He is selfish and careless, but he is not the murderer. The murderer is the woman who has been running the building, organizing the memorial services, accepting the Pansy, and comforting the parents.

Rachel

Rachel's last move is theater. She calls Heather pretending to be Sarah, her graduate assistant, sobbing that Rachel has hanged herself in the office. Heather rushes over and finds Sarah tied to a chair and Rachel very much alive, wearing a new cashmere sweater set and holding a stun gun.

The confession is ugly and strangely petty. Rachel has a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, which is how she built the pipe bomb. She has spent her adult life working harder than everyone around her and watching prettier, luckier women get the jobs, the men, and the attention. Christopher was hers. She lost weight for him, changed her face and her wardrobe for him, took a job in his parents' building for him. The freshmen he slept with were not people to her. They were distractions.

She stunned Elizabeth and Roberta, opened the elevator doors with the stolen key, and dropped them down the shaft. She made the deaths look like elevator surfing, a stunt that kills careless kids often enough that nobody questions it. She planted the planter on the roof. She planted the bomb. She was going to kill Heather and Sarah and make it look like a murder-suicide, or a suicide, or whatever story fit best.

Then she marches Heather up to the Allingtons' penthouse, because the apartment is empty and the terrace is private. The plan is to throw Heather off the roof and explain it as a jump. Heather, whose hands are still stitched from the bomb, fights back with pepper spray and a fist. The pepper spray nozzle is clogged. The punch lands. Rachel's nose breaks. They wrestle in the rain on the terrace.

Mrs. Allington, who has been drinking in the apartment, comes out with a bottle of Absolut and hits Rachel in the head with it. Rachel collapses. The book's final joke, and its title, arrive in the same line: "I'm a size twelve," Mrs. Allington says, standing over the unconscious killer.

What works and what creaks

The ending is satisfying in the way a farce is satisfying. The killer is the boss who seemed too competent, the weapon is a vodka bottle, and the woman who saves the day is the alcoholic mother of the man everyone suspected. Cabot keeps the tone light even when the body count rises, and Heather's voice is the reason the book works. She is self-deprecating without being a doormat, and her observations about dorm life are specific enough to feel lived in. The soda machine refunds, the passive-aggressive memos, the student workers who treat the mailroom like a crisis center: these are the details that make Fischer Hall feel real.

The mystery itself is thinner than the voice. Rachel is a visible suspect from early on, partly because the book keeps insisting she is perfect and partly because the alternative suspects are so obviously red herrings. The investigation proceeds by coincidence and paperwork rather than deduction. Heather does not solve the case so much as stumble into the killer's trap and survive it. Readers who want a fair-play puzzle with clues planted at regular intervals will find the machinery loose.

There is also the weight talk. The book is trying to be body-positive, and in 2005 a size-12 heroine who eats Oreos and refuses to apologize was a meaningful thing. But the narration still makes jokes about Tania's plastic surgery and her "real" size, and Rachel's thinness is treated as evidence of something wrong with her. The book wants to say that size does not determine worth, then keeps using size as a shorthand for character. It is a contradiction the novel never really examines.

The pacing sags in the middle, when Heather interviews students and rehashes the same two deaths. Cooper's skepticism repeats. Jordan's pursuit repeats. Sarah's nervous chatter repeats. The book is 368 pages, and a tighter 280 would have made the jokes land harder. The romance is also a slow burn that barely burns: Cooper is appealing, but he spends most of the novel being right about everything and withholding, and the forehead kiss at the end is less a payoff than a promise for the next book.

None of that stops the book from being fun. It is not a procedural, and it is not a thriller. It is a comic novel about a woman starting over in a job that keeps handing her dead bodies, and it is best enjoyed on that terms. Readers who like Stephanie Plum, or who want a mystery that does not take itself seriously, will settle in quickly. Readers who want grit, forensic detail, or a killer who is genuinely hard to guess should look elsewhere.

The last chapter does not tie everything into a bow. Rachel is in jail awaiting trial. Heather gets two weeks of paid leave, a new boss, and a memorial for Beth and Bobby: two dogwoods in the park and a scholarship in their names. Cooper tells her she is brave, that he admires the way she keeps going, and that he likes nice girls. Then he kisses her forehead. Heather, lying in the rain with stitches in her hands and glass in her back, decides it is enough for now. It is a small ending, and a honest one. She is not a pop star anymore. She is not a size two. She is alive, she has a dog to walk, and she has a reason to get up in the morning.

FAQ

Is Size 12 Is Not Fat the first Heather Wells book?

Yes. It was published in 2005 by Avon Books and introduces Heather, Cooper Cartwright, and Fischer Hall.

Is it a cozy mystery?

It is a comic mystery with a body count, closer to chick lit than a police procedural. The violence is mostly offstage, but two students are murdered.

Does Heather end up with Cooper?

The novel ends with a forehead kiss and no commitment, leaving the romance to later books in the series.