I've been getting some email asking me to do more book reviews. What stops me from doing them is I feel that once I start, I would be unable to stop. Mysterious Matters isn't meant to be a review site per se, but I do realize that I can further my mission of making the world aware of fabulous small-press/independent publisher books by reviewing some of the best of them. So, I'm thinking, for the next few weeks, I'll blog about such titles.
FINAL APPROACH
Rachel Brady
Poisoned Pen Press
A debut I quite enjoyed was Rachel Brady's Final Approach. Certainly the skydiving theme is one that I haven't seen explored before, and it is always pleasant to enter a new milieu and learn something about it and the characters who inhabit it. (And lest anyone believe that skydivers are any less fanatical than, say, rock climbers or bungee jumpers, Final Approach will prove you wrong.) One problem I often find in debut novels is pacing; they can be slow to start or burdened in the early chapters by backstory. Final Approach takes off like a shot and features a likable heroine, Emily Locke, who lost her husband and child to a mysterious accident four years earlier. She's recruited by a disgraced former detective, now a P.I., for her help in another missing-child case. The plot moves along nicely, and the dialogue is enjoyable; Emily trades barbs with her best friend, Jeannie, while finding several possible love interests not only in the P.I. but also in a - yes - cowboy. Of course we know that people can't just drop their lives and fly to Houston to skydive and help solve the disappearances of children, but somehow Brady makes it all work. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have the recently published sequel, Dead Lift, on my TBR pile.
HOUNDVincent McCaffrey
Small Beer Press
A very different book is Vincent McCaffrey's Hound, one of those P.D. James-type mystery-cum-literary fiction books. By that I mean, the writing is so assured, and the observations so crystalline, that it really did not need to be a "mystery" to work. Yet I'm glad the book is positioned as a mystery, because that gives it a much larger potential market and readership, which it so richly deserves.
Our hero is Henry Sullivan, a Boston bookseller. The mystery comes in as he searches for the killer of an old girlfriend. There's a lot of thought put into the book business in Hound; Sullivan bewails what's become of the book business, in which the ghostwritten books of airheaded Hollywood celebs reach the heights of the bestseller lists while quality books by writers who toil in obscurity find themselves remaindered and pulped, or not even reviewed. But Sullivan's not just an effete, bookish type; he knows how to hold his own, which makes him a thinking man's hero with just the right amount of macho. One might see Hound as the male version of Diane Satterfield's The Thirteenth Tale - but Hound is the better book. Both McCaffrey's and Satterfield's protagonists are intense bibliophiles, but while Satterfield's is mopey and sometimes unsympathetic, McCaffrey's is more balanced and functional. The pace of Hound is slower than one would want in a traditional "mystery," but somehow that doesn't matter--I'm reminded of another book that made me feel this way, Ashna Graves' Death Pans Out. Hound's tone is nostalgic and sometimes sad, but this is a great read for book lovers, and indeed for all of us who look back to the "good old days" when life seemed simpler and where the fantasy reigned supreme that "merit" was the only criterion for publication (or any other type of success). My only fear is that the "book" theme will peg the book as for "book lovers" only; the book deserves a wider readership than that (and a better cover, too).
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