Category: Books-Fiction

Broken Promise – Linwood Barclay

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Broken Promise – Linwood Barclay (Promise Falls #1)

 

In Broken Promise, the latest from Linwood Barclay, the author returns to the town of Promise Falls, New York and pens another terrific thriller. Promise Falls was the setting for two of Barclay’s previous books, Never Look Away and Too Close to Home. Many familiar character populate Broken Promise including: Police Detective Barry Duckworth, Landscaper Eddie Cutter and his son Derek and the main protagonist David Harwood. Harwood and his family wife Jan and son Ethan were the main characters in Never Look Away. Broken Promise picks up David’s life several years after Never Look Back,  David and Ethan have returned to Promise Falls where David has returned to his former job as a reporter for the town newspaper, only to have the newspaper shut down on his first day of work! His only option is to move back in with mom and dad! One day his mom asks David to look in on his cousin Marla. Marla is having a hard time after losing a baby about ten months prior.When David arrives at Marla’s he notices a spot of blood on the front door and Marla is caring for a ten-month old baby, that she says an “Angel” delivered to her door!

When the mother of the baby is found brutally murdered, Marla becomes the prime suspect! Soon David is asked to find out anything he can to help prove that Marla is innocent. But as David digs deeper, solving the crime may rip his family apart!!

Typically, in a Linwood Barclay’s book one ordinary person is put in an extraordinary situation and that happens in Broken Promise as David sets out to discover how Marla ended up with the baby and who really killed the baby’s mother.But along with the mystery surrounding Marla and the murder there are other extraordinary events happening in Promise Falls; including the slaughter of 23 squirrels, attacks on the local college campus and a message painted on mannequins placed on the ferris wheel of an abandoned amusement park. All these events seem to indicate that maybe Promise Falls is a broken town!

At Goodreads Broken Promise is labeled as (Promise Falls #1) and certainly there were enough questions to be answered at the  end of Broken Promise to provided a storyline for Promise Falls #2 Far From True, which will be released in March of 2016. I have enjoyed all of Barclay’s standalone books, but there is something special about a book series and I am certainly looking forward to spending more time with the residents of Promise Falls!! I have a pretty good idea of who may be responsible for several of the happenings, but as for the killer, I haven’t a clue!! I can’t wait until March!!

Bottom-Line: Broken Promise is a four and a half star book! I can certainly be enjoyed without reading the two other books mentioned, but each of those books were outstanding reads and certainly stand on their own!! So check them all out!!!!

Book 40 of 2015

The Shining Girls – Lauren Beukes

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The Shining Girls Didn’t Shine for me! (Book 39 for 2015)

So – have you ever zipped through a book, enjoyed it, and yet felt that you never really connected with the book? That may be the best way to describe how I feel about The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes. It obviously wasn’t how Tana French felt about the book, on the cover of the book French’s quote reads…..

“Utterly original, beautifully written, and I  must say, it creeped the holy bejesus out of me. This is something special” 

I originally discovered this book in a post titled 10 Novels That Will Scare The Hell Out Of You written by Julie Buntin for The Huffington Post. When I found the book in the library I read the last quote on the back cover of the book…..

Imagine Poe and Steinbeck in a knife fight where Poe wins and writes Jack the Ripper’s version of :The Grapes of Wrath Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls is even scarier than that” Richard Kadrey author of Sandman Slim

Ok so I was prepared to be scared – I wasn’t.! The novel follows the exploits of the “time-traveling serial killer Harper Curtis, who discovers a depression-era house that opens to other times. Within the house are the names of the five “shining girls” that Harper knows he is supposed to kill. Harper jumps in and out of the lives of these girls until he discovers the right time to kill them. He is successful until the last shining girl Kirby Mazrachi survives Harper’s brutal attack! Teaming with Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dan Velasquez, Kirby sets out to find and stop Harper!!

First things,first I read this book very quickly and enjoyed it, BUT I was never really scared! I also never figured out why Harper wanted to kill these women other than their names were written in his handwriting on the walls of “the house” In fact I never really connected with Harper i.e I didn’t like the character or sympathize with the character. For that matter I didn’t even sympathize with his victims. Throughout the book I kept waiting for something to happen that would connect all the killings, but that never happened!

I did kinda’ like the two other main characters in The Shining Girls Kirby and Dan. Kirby was a plucky survivor with her mind and heart set on finding and settling the score with Harper. While Dan has his heart and mind set on protecting Kirby!!

Bottomline:  I would give The Shining  Girls three stars- I found the book ok, but I certainly didn’t find it as compelling or scary as others have found the book. For me the book just lacked something – it may have been the depth of the characters – but for me The Shining Girls just didn’t shine!! Having said that I at some point try another book from Lauren Beukes like Moxyland or Zoo City

Ok so tell me why I should have loved this book!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading Challenges – Late September Update

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 Reading Challenges Three Books Finished in September – Thirty-Eight for 2015!

This afternoon I finished John Scalzi’s The Last Colony It is the third book that I have read in September and the 38th book finished in 2015. The other two books finished this month are Better Than Before from Gretchen Rubin and Robert Ludlum‘s The Matarese Circle.

I had planned to read both The Last Colony and Better Than Before. The two other books that I had planned to read for my reading challenges were Mayhem a historical fiction read and The Lost Triumph a nonfiction read about the Battle of Gettysburg.  While I started both books, neither caught my attention strongly enough to keep reading either of the books. I have been reading two other books though. The Shining Girls from Lauren Beukes and Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol.  Both of these books have been really good and I hope that I can finish either one or both of them before the end of the month!

Tonight I checked on the two books I have requested from the library,  Alex Kava‘s Silent Creed and Broken Promise from Linwood Barclay, Silent Creed is ready for pickup and I am now third in the que for Broken Promise! So I will go and pick up the Kava book tomorrow and who knows how quickly I can read that one!!

Here is an update on my various reading challenges….

Reading Challenge From TBR Pile Buy/Library Total Goal %complete
2015 Nonfiction Reading Challenge 0 5 5 11 45%
2015 Cloak & Dagger Reading Challenge 7 15 22 23 96%
2015 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 1 2 3 5 60%
2015 Science Fiction/Fantasy Challenge 3 4 7 12 58%
No Reading Challenge 0 1 1 0 100%
Totals 11 38 51 75%

While I have read 38 books in 2015 only 37 of them count toward my reading challenges. As a result I need to read 14 more books to reach my goal of 51 books read. Six of those final books need to be nonfiction. one a cloak and dagger book, two historical fictions and five science fiction books. All of the books need to be from my TBR shelves to meet the TBR challenge total of 25 books!!

So for the remainder of the month I will continue to read The Shining Girls and Amazing Grace and start Silent Creed  In the meantime I will look over my TBR shelves for some nonfiction, historical fiction and sci-fi! Hum, The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War looks interesting!!!

Wish Me Luck!!

The Matarese Countdown – Robert Ludlum

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The Matarese Countdown a Return to the Works of Robert Ludlum

 

Robert Ludlum - author of The Matarese CountdownI finished The Matarese Countdown (Book Number 37 for 2015) yesterday and it was another good read from one of the masters of the thriller genre Robert Ludlum. The book was one of the last books written by Ludlum, before his death in 2001. Through the 1990s my reading changed from reading political thrillers to mostly mystery series, but  during the 1980s Robert Ludlum’s novels were mainstays of my reading. They were always were thrilling reads, as typically, either one person or a small group of people was out to save the world. They were action packed with very well drawn plots and characters. Ludlum’s descriptive writing style really made it feel like you were part of the action, Ludlum wrote over 27 thrillers. The number of copies of his books in print is estimated between 290 million and 500 million. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries

After Ludlum’s death, several novels or novels based on his outlines were released. They were penned by authors like Eric Van Lustbader  who continued the tales of Jason Bourne and Gayle Lynds, Patrick Larkin and Kyle Mills who created a series called Covert-One based on the ideas of Robert Ludlum.

The following from Wikipedia is a description of the writings of Robert Ludlum…

Ludlum’s novels typically feature one heroic man, or a small group of crusading individuals, in a struggle against powerful adversaries whose intentions and motivations are evil and who are capable of using political and economic mechanisms in frightening ways. The world in his writings is one where global corporations, shadowy military forces and government organizations all conspire to preserve (if it is good) or undermine (if it is evil) the status quo.

Ludlum’s novels were often inspired by conspiracy theories, both historical and contemporary. He wrote that The Matarese Circle was inspired by rumors about the Trilateral Commission, and it was published only a few years after the commission was founded. His depictionsThe Matarese Countdown of terrorism in books such as The Holcroft Covenant and The Matarese Circle reflected the theory that terrorists, rather than being merely isolated bands of ideologically motivated extremists, are actually pawns of governments or private organizations who are using them to facilitate the establishment of authoritarian rule. Read More

The Matarese Countdown was published in 1997 eighteen years after the 1979 release of The Matarese Circle. I read The Matarese Circle sometime in the early 1980s before I started keeping a log of my reads, so it’s probably been a good thirty years since I read the book. But not remembering all of the details of the prior book, did not hamper my enjoyment of  The Matarese Countdown, The plot of The Matarese Countdown revolves around the re-establishment of The Matarese, a shadowy organization that is between on destroying the world’s economy to obtain global domination! One of the heroes of the book is Brandon Schofield, who along with his wife Antonia are called out of retirement to battle the Matarese. Scofield thought that he had destroyed The Matarese twenty years prior only to find that they are back stronger than ever! So Scofield aka Beowolf Agate teams with CIA case officer Cameron Pryce and Army Intelligence Officer Leslie Montrose in a race to destroy The Matarese before the Countdown reaches zero and the world economy crashes!!

I will say that it took me a while to finish this book. I started it several months ago and set it aside to finish several other books. I picked it up again earlier this week and yesterday I didn’t, or rather couldn’t, put it down until it was finished!! So check it out!! Obviously, since I didn’t remember much about The Matarese Circle, one book can be enjoyed without reading the other!!

Hum, let’s see there are other Ludlum books on my TBR shelves The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Janson Directive and I need to read some more from my shelves to meet my TBR Pile Challenge! Could another Ludlum be in my future?

 

Renaissance Granddad’s Favorite Books of the 70s!

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An AARP Post leads to a list of My Favorite Books from the 1970s!

 

This morning my wife said “you’re old. please join AARP so we can at least derive some benefits from you ancientness!” Actually, she didn’t say that, but she did ask me to join AARP so that we can hopefully get a discount on our Ancestry.com renewal! While I was on the site registering and paying the whole $16.00 a year membership this post Readers’ Picks: 10 Books Boomers Love caught my attention.These are the books that the readers picked:

10 The World According to Garp – John Irving
9. The Joy of Sex – Edited by Alex Comfort
8. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
7. Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
6. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
5 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
4. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
3 Roots – Alex Haley
2. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
1 Catcher in the Rye – J.D Salinger

While the above list is a terrific list, it is not my reading list! I have only read two of the books on the list – Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. So I thought that I put together a list of my favorite books that were published and read mostly during my high school and college years.

Renaissance Granddad’s Favorite Reads from the 1970s – as best he can remember!

 

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Several of the authors among those shown could have had two or more books on the list. John Fowles’  The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s The First Circle., Tom Tryon’s The Other and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, could have all been on the list!

The late high school years along with the college’s year set the tone for the life that follows. Is there a better music than the music of your generation, at least there isn’t for the music of mine! And the books you read lay a foundation for future reading as well help guide you along  your life’s path. The works of Herman Hesse helped me discover and accept the duality of nature, Catch-22 and August 1914 taught me about the absurdities and the horrors of war, and Stephen King and Tom Tryon taught me to be afraid of the dark – very afraid! The Day of the Jackal and The Eye of the Needle ignited a love of political thrillers,Watership Down and All Creatures Great and Small enhanced my love of animals.

Then there is Death at an Early Age, Reading the story of Jonathan Kozol‘s first year as a teacher in a very poor Boston school, was upsetting. When I read the book and I felt so sorry for those poor children, the saddest thing may be that in many schools throughout America things haven’t changed all that much, especially in the inner city schools. Anyway reading Death at an Early Age led me to an Education degree from the University of Georgia. Unfortunately, the twists and turns of my life resulted in that degree going unused! But I hope that my love of learning and reading has been passed on to my children and they will in turn pass it on to their children. And maybe my daughter Elizabeth, who is in her final year of her Masters program in Educational Psychology at the University of Delaware, will do what I didn’t and help some of those in need children!

So there is the list of some of my favorite books of the 1970s. It was a fun exercise and I think many of those books should be visited again!  How many of my books have you other boomers read?? What were some of your favorites from that era??

Badlands (Highway Quartet #3) – C.J. Box

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c Badlands - C.J.Box

 Originally Posted September 2015 Updated and Revised May 2026

Badlands – (Highway Quartet #3)

After finishing Windigo Island, I read Badlands from C.J,Box. Box is the author of the Joe Pickett series, another of my favorite series.During his career Box has written several outstanding standalone thrillers A while back The Highway one of the standalones features Detectives Cody Hoyt and Cassie Dewell. and a terrific villain the Lizard King, A long-distance trucker who preys on the women who service long distance truckers a rest stops along the nation’s highway. The women are known as “lot lizards”. Badlands is book two in the Cassie Dewell series and while I wished that there was more about the Lizard King in the storyline, the rest of the storyline made up for it.

The Story

Grimstad, North Dakota – a place people used to be from, but were never headed to – has struck oil. As pipelines snake across the prairie, oil flows out and men and money flow in. And with them, comes crime. North Dakota’s new oil capital has a serious law and order problem and newly qualified detective Cassie Dewell has just been assigned as its deputy sheriff…..

….With the temperature dropping to 30 below and a gang war heating up, Cassie fears she might be in over her head but the key to it all will come in the most unlikely form: an undersized boy on a bike who keeps showing up where he doesn’t belong. Read More


My Thoughts

I enjoy C.J.Box’s books because of his ability to create believable characters that you want to root for. like Joe Pickett, and his family and Nate Romanowski. Of course there are also some you want to root against like Joe’s Mother-in-law Missy. In Cassie Dewell Box has created another one to root for, a war widow with a young son, who does her job with grit, and determination and some empathy for the people she serves.

And You Should

Since Box’s last Joe Pickett novel Endangered just came out in March of this year, I guess we have a little while to wait for Joe’s next adventure so it would be a good time to pick up Open Season the first of the 16  Joe Pickett books.  Or maybe just Back of Beyond the first Cody Hoyt book or a standalone like Three Weeks to Say Goodbye. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed!!

iAuthor’s Website
Facebook
Twitter
Goodreads
Goodreads:Joe Pickett Series

C J Box author of Storm Watch

About C J Box

Charles James Box Jr. is an American author of more than thirty novels. Box is the author of the Joe Pickett series, as well as several standalone novels, and a collection of short stories.

Visit the Author Page

And You Should Pick Up One of these…

You won’t be sorry…….

Open Season Joe Pickett #1
Back of Beyond Cody Hoyt #1
Tjhree Weeks to Say Goodbye
Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

Open Season – Joe Pickett #1 – The one that started it all, introducing a game warden who values the truth over his own safety.

Back of Beyond — Cody Hoyt #1 – A raw, high-stakes introduction to a detective battling his own demons while hunting a killer in the wilderness.

Three Weeks to Say Goodbye — A standalone nail-biter that proves just how far a parent will go when their family is threatened by a powerful enem

2026 Update – The latest from C J Box The Crossroads was released in early 2026. It sits waiting on my TBR shelves…..

Windigo Island – William Kent Krueger

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Windigo Island-  William Kent Krueger – (Cork O’Connor # 14)

 

William Kent Krueger - Windigo Island authorI started reading the Cork O’Connor series from William Kent Krueger back in 2003 when I picked up Purgatory Ridge, Book #3 in the series, at the library. After finishing the book I quickly sought out the first two books in the series and have not missed a book since!! Cork O’ Connor is the former sheriff of Tamarack County, Minnesota, he is part Ojibwe and Irish. He is also the father of Jennie, Annie and Stephen O’Connor and is constantly battling evil in the County and beyond. Cork uses all the forces that he can gather to fight the evil, that includes the powers of his spiritual mentor Henry Meloux. In Windigo Island Cork and Henry battle a Windigo both the mythical and the rel versions! From Goodreads.com….

Cork O’Connor battles vicious villains, both mythical and modern, to rescue a young girl in the latest nail-biting mystery from New York Times bestselling author William Kent Krueger.

When the body of a teenage Ojibwe girl washes up on the shore of an island in Lake Superior, the residents of the nearby Bad Bluff reservation whisper that it was the work of a mythical beast, the Windigo, or a vengeful spirit called Michi Peshu. Such stories have been told by the Ojibwe people for generations, but they don’t solve the mystery of how the girl and her friend, Mariah Arceneaux, disappeared a year ago. At the request of the Arceneaux family, Cork O’Connor, former sheriff turned private investigator, is soon on the case…..Read More

What I love about reading this series or other series for that matter is the development of the characters over the life of the series. The O’Connor family has been through some tough times over the course of the series. Annie has left home to become a nun after a harrowing experience (Red Knife) and Stephen has been shoot and left paralyzed (Tamarack County) and Jennie has become an adoptive mother after rescuing a baby.(Northwest Angle) not to mention the biggest family tragedy of all the happened in Heaven’s Keep – and I won’t but don’t read this book first!! Now as Cork unravels the mystery of what happened to Mariah Arceneaux he is trying to make up for all his past failures to rescue or keep from harm the ones he loves. In Windigo Island Cork is aided in his quest not only by Henry but also by daughter Jennie, whose eyes are opened to the lives of her Ojibwe brothers and sisters and to her own heritage!

I can’t say enough about this series it is one of my favorites and William Kent Krueger just keeps getting better and better! You can probably start anywhere in the series and enjoy the book (except Heaven’s Keep #9)  but you may just as well start at the being with Iron Lake and enjoy the full story of Cork O’Connor and his family!!

Book 34 of 2015

Alex – Pierre Lemaitre – As good as it gets!

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Alex – Pierre Lemaitre – Commandant Camille Verhoeven

(Book # 2)      

 

Author of Alex - Pierre LemaitreSeveral weeks ago, when I was in the library I saw an interesting book titled Camille, by a French author Pierre Lemaitre it is the third book in  a series that features Commandant Camille Verhoeven. At the time I didn’t know that, but I did see that the Camille was the sequel to Alex, so I requested  Alex thinking that I was starting at the beginning of the series. Wrong – Alex was actually the first of the three books to be translated and released in the US, but the first book in the series is actually Irene. And since Camille is suffering from the effects of what happened in Irene, I wish I had read that book first!! With that being said I am actually glad that I read Alex because it was a terrific read. I guess, that is to be expected from a book that won the 2013 International Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel. Let me tell you, the book lived up to its billing! From Pierre Lemaitre’s website…..

Commandant Camille Verhoeven has nothing to go on: no suspect, no lead, rapidly diminishing hope. All he knows is that Alex Prévost was snatched off the streets of Paris and bundled into a white van. But Alex – beautiful, resourceful, tough – is no ordinary victim.

Alex was kidnapped by the father of her ex-boyfriend, who is missing. The father hangs a naked Alex in a cage and tells her he wants to watch her DIE! He frequently comes back to take her picture, as she starts her descent toward death, oh and to feed the rats!! The father keeps returning, until the night the police discover that he is the kidnapper, but rather than be captured, the father jumps to his death on a busy Parisian street….. and now the question becomes can Camille and his fellow officers find Alex before she dies!! Oh, and before they do, they discover the body of her ex-boyfriend…..his killer murdered him by pouring battery acid down his throat!! Is is connected to Alex???

Yes the pages flew by on this one and the solution to the crimes was not the resolution of the story!! And the end, well, that what sets Alex apart from your average crime fiction!!!

For those of you who like me may be unfamiliar with Pierre Lemaitre here is some biographical information from Wikipedia…..

Pierre Lemaitre (born 19 April 1951 in Paris) is a Prix Goncourt-winning French author and a screenwriter. His first novel to be translated into English, Alex,[1] is a translation of the French book of the same title,[2] it won the CWA International Dagger for best crime novel of 2013.[1][3] In November 2013, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize, for Au revoir là-haut, an epic about World War I.[4] His novel Camille won the CWA International Dagger in 2015 Read More

Bottom Line: Alex was one terrific ride….it had me at the beginning the middle and the end!! The characters are all well drawn from Alex to Camille and his fellow officers. Here is a quote from the back cover of the book that sums up Alex nicely…… Rating *****

Oh, and by the way, I just requested Irene from my library!

“Moves from read-as-fast-as-you-can horror to an intricately plotted race to a dark truth” Guardian

Book 33 for 2015

Links to Further Explorations of the novels of Pierre Lemaitre

Website
Amazon
Goodreads

The Highway – C.J.Box Another Winner from Box!

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C.J. Box – The Highway -Cody Hoyt #2 – Cassie Dewell #1

 

Last week I saw that C.J.Box would be releasing a new box on the 28th of this month titled Badlands. The book is the sequel to his release The Highway. Now I am a fan of C.J Box’s work and have read all but one of one of the Joe Pickett novels  and why I never finished Cold Wind, I really can’t say, but I have stayed away from The Highway. Why? Again, I can’t say, But with the second book of this Cassie Dewell series coming out, I thought better get on the stick and read The Highway! When I went to Amazon, I discovered that the Kindle edition of the book was only $2.99 and well that sealed the deal!! Last Tuesday, I finished the book and all I can say is that I should have known better!! C.J.Box is a terrific author and The Highway is as good as any of his Joe Pickett books or his stand-alone books!!

The Highway introduces the reader to a new character Cassie Dewell, a young detective new to the Lewis & Clark County Police Department. When the story opens Cassie is waiting to catch her partner Cody Hoyt, a splendid and somewhat rogue detective, planting evidence at a murder scene! She succeeds and soon Hoyt is suspended from the force.

Meanwhile, a long distance trucker known as the Lizard King, a psychopath who preys on prostitutes, who work the truck stops has accidentally killed his last conquest. In his haste in leaving the truck stop he almost kills two young girls. Those two young girls, Danielle and Grace Sullivan are traveling from their Colorado home to Omaha to visit their father, only Danielle decides to visit her boyfriend in Montana on the way! That boyfriend just happens to be Cody Hoyt’s son Justin. Soon the two girls are kidnapped by the Lizard King and Cody Hoyt is off to save them with Cassie helping at home!

Cody Hoyt, Justin and the Sullivan girls all appeared in Box’s Back of Beyond, which was another great book by Box! All of these characters are well drawn the damaged Hoyt and the spunky Grace Sullivan and her ditsy sister Danielle. Additionally, the new character Cassie Dewell is one that you can definitely root for!!

Bottom Line: The Highway while darker than the Joe Pickett novels was a great read! The pages flew by and the story twisted and turned until the very end! There was one twist that I didn’t see coming and I still don’t believe happened. I can’t wait until the 28th for the release of Badlands!! So don’t do what I did, go and get The Highway now!! Rating: ****

Links for the Further Exploration of the Books of C.J.Box

C.J Box Website
Twitter
Facebook
Goodreads: C.J. Box, The Highway
Amazon: C.J.Box

 

 

The Poacher’s Son – Paul Doiron

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Paul Doiron – The Poacher’s Son – (Mike Bowditch #1) – Maine Game Warden

 

Paul Doiran - The Poacher's SonA while back I saw an ad on a sidebar at Goodreads.com for a book called The Precipice by Paul Doiron. I read that the book was part of a series that features Mike Bowditch who is a Game Warden in Maine. Since I am a big fan of another game warden Joe Pickett who resides out in the great state of Wyoming, I figured that this book would be right up my alley. When I went to Goodreads to find our more about Mike Bowditch, I discovered that The Precipice is the sixth book that features him as the main character. Since the series is not all that new i.e there are less than ten books in the series, I figured that it would be best to go back to the first book and start the series at the beginning and start reading the series with book one, The Poacher’s Son. So that’s what I did and I am glad that I did! The Poachers Son was a great read!

The plot of The Poacher’s Son begins when Mike misses a call from his father, who he hasn’t had contact with for two years. His father leaves a message that he needs Mike’s help! The next morning discovers that a police officer and a business man have been shot in the northern part of Maine, where Mike’s dad lives. His father is the prime suspect and when he was detained for questioning, he attacked the arresting officer and escaped into the woods, after crashing the police car and leaving the officer for dead. Mike is about the only person in the state that believes that his father is innocent and as he sets out to prove it his whole life starts to unravel!

The Poacher’s Son is an award-winning book among the awards it won were;  the Barry Award and the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel, an Anthony Award, a Macavity Award, and a Thriller Award for Best First Novel, and the Maine Literary Award for “Best Fiction of 2010.”. It was nominated for an Edgar Award, and PopMatters named it to its Best Fiction of 2010 list.

Bottom Line: The Poacher’s Son was an outstanding novel dealing with not only the mystery surrounding the brutal murders, but also with Mike and his father Jack’s relationship. Andre Dubus III says this about the novel….

“With precise and evocative prose, Paul Doiron weaves a riveting tale set deep in the wilderness that can be the tenuous bond between father and son. This is a compelling, moving and utterly impressive debut”

and Nelson DeMille writes:

:The Poacher’s Son is one of the best-written debut novels I’ve read in years. The story has it all – a great plot. a wonderful Maine woods setting, a truly remarkable and believable cast of characters”

I liked everything about this book, the setting,  the main characters and the intricately woven tale of belief in a parent, that you feel guilt over not liking, but yet would do anything to save!! Rating **** plus!

So check it out! As for me I have to check out book #2 in the series The Trespasser!!  Move over Joe Pickett and make room for Mike Bowditch on my bookshelves!

Links for Further Explorations of Paul Doiron and Mike Bowditch

Authors’ Website
Twitter
Facebook
Amazon
Goodreads: Paul Doiron
Goodreads: Mike Bowditch

 

Book 31 for 2015 – 17 on a goal of 23 in my Clock and Dagger Reading Challenge!!