Local Color Illuminates an Intriguing Tale of Obstacles Faced and Overcome

Cayo Costa Cross, by John D. Mills. Pono Publishing. 217 pages. Paperback $9.99.

This is an utterly charming novel that also has grit, strong insights into human nature, and plenty of regional detail for readers who will enjoy the SW Florida setting, Mr. Mills builds upon his many years of legal experience to draw readers into the world of a marriage gone wrong and its possible resolution. He also laces the story with local history and builds part of its premise from that history.

Though set primarily in the present time, the story begins at the outset of the 20^th century with a family secret. Readers learn of an anguished man, Jim McKenzie, who desperately needed money to afford a cure for his daughter’s tuberculosis. He steals a gold cross which he intends to turn into the cash that he needs. However, things don’t go well and he ends up burying the artifact on the island of Cayo Costa. He writes a detailed letter to his wife Claire that describes the location of the cross, and that letter eventually finds its way into the hands of is distant relative, Lynn Chapman. However, the cross remains hidden. 

Lynn’s greedy, conniving husband Bobby is about to face her in court if a mediation is not successful. He has convinced himself that he has the right to profit from Lynn’s potential inheritance, and he has taken some steps recover it.

The mediation does not go well, in large part because of Bobby’s nasty, self-aggrandizing personality. However, this section of the novel is fascinating in outlining how the legal system works. Readers meet several interesting characters including Lynn’s lawyer Beth Mancini; Beth’s boyfriend Frank Powers, who is a prosecutor with the State Attorney’s Office; and Michelle Barnes, the official mediator for the Chapmans’ case. Through these characters and many others in the course of the novel, legal abstractions become clear and personalized.

Bobby Chapman does have some potentially useful talents. He has the technological skills imagination that enable him to invent a way to possibly retrieve the long-hidden gold cross hidden on Cayo Costa island.

Bobby’s approach includes burning the vegetation on the island to the ground to help uncover the cross’s hiding place and, later, employing a drone and explosives to threaten his wife and her new paramour from discovering it first. Bobby is filled with hate, and the author’s portrait of his childhood and upbringing brings understanding about what makes him tick. He is shaped by an unappealing macho / good old boy culture.

John D. Mills

The man making romantic inroads on Lynn’s heart is Doug Shearer. When Lynn decides that she needs to employ a private detective to find the cross before Bobby does, Beth recommends Doug for the job. It’s a fortuitous match of personalities. Doug has a background in law enforcement. He is one of several characters through whom Mr. Mills paints a very positive and uplifting picture of people with law enforcement careers.

John Mills uses his descriptive skills to provide a wide range of characters, the flavor of the Lee County fishing and boating community, and many other touches of local color. The author offers a good introduction to the islands that dot the waterways. Readers will enjoy the growing relationship between Lynn and Doug. This reader wouldn’t mind meeting them again in another novel.

About the author:

John D. Mills is a fifth generation native of Fort Myers. He grew up fishing the waters of Pine Island Sound, and it’s still his favorite hobby. He graduated from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia with a BBA in Finance and worked for Lee County Bank in Ft. Myers for five months. He returned to Macon and graduated from Mercer’s law school in 1989. He started his legal career as a prosecutor for the State Attorney’s Office in Fort Myers. In 1990, he began his private practice concentrating in divorce and criminal defense. Cayo Costa Cross is his eighth novel. This novel, and several other recent ones, comprise the Pine Island Sound Mystery sequence. The related books include: “The Trophy Wife Divorce,” “The Hooker, the Dancer, and the Nun,” and “Pine Island Gold.”

 

Q & A Interview with John D. Mills

Q: What is your favorite part of the writing process?  A:   Crafting a surprise ending!  I’m an avid reader and I always enjoy an unexpected twist/surprise at the end of a book.  I spend a tremendous amount of time trying to do this in my books.

Q: What writing challenges give you the most trouble?  A:  When I’m trying to do a compelling back story on my characters.  I don’t like anyone to call my characters boring or predictable!

Q: Do you compose by parts or by wholes?  A:  I try to do a basic outline of the story before I begin writing.  After the outline is done, I break it into pieces – sort of like a jigsaw puzzle.  Of course, during the 2^nd & 3^rd drafts of the book, I add a little more information about the characters and subplots that I try to bring together at the end.

Q: What are your habits of revision?  A:   I have learned to pay all different kinds of people to help me edit different drafts of the book.  Young, old, middle-aged, book-smart educated, self-taught educated, religious, non-religious, superstitious, OCD, and people with different backgrounds than me.  I have learned that different people see things that are confusing to them, and they relate to character conflicts in unique ways.  I’m always amazed at the different responses I get from my editors.  As a follow-up, I hire different editors for the second and third drafts to try t0 create an entertaining read.

Q: Are there common skills that connect your work as a novelist with your work as a lawyer?  A:  Different people have their own “versions” of the truth and I try to have my characters promote their own “version” of the truth to create conflict between the characters.  Q: Are there any features of your experience as a fisherman that overlap with your fiction writing?  A: Patience!

Q: Who are among your favorite writers?  A:  John Grisham, John D. McDonald, and Randy Wayne White.

“The Old Stories,” by David Selcer

How a seemingly ordinary individual can play an extraordinary role

Review by Philip K. Jason

The Old Stories, by David Selcer. Biblio Publishing. 234 pages. Trade paperback $12.95.

It’s hard to separate the strands of memoir, history, biography, and imagination in David Selcer’s provocative, informative, and deeply moving book. Perhaps the genre doesn’t matter that much. It’s a feast of information and revelation, past and present, satisfaction and regret.

As the Nineteen Century came to a close in the town of Kherson within the Ukrainian province of Greater Russia, a young boy – not at all a scholar – toiled with his lessons at the Great Choral Synagogue. He hated his studies, but enjoyed paging through the stories of Sholem Aleichem, the great Jewish storyteller whose Yiddish tales offered humor and profundity. At nine, Chaim Zelitzer could not absorb the great teachings of the Torah and the Talmud. He had a practical turn of mind. At a young age, his was happy enough to please his father and uncle by becoming a skilled metal worker. But he stumbled through his Bar Mitzvah preparation.

Chaim did honor the traditional goal of the Tzadik: of becoming a righteous man.

His older brother, Shmuel, was on his way to becoming a famous cantor.

Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1905) prompted the teenage sailor (Chaim) to “go AWOL” to Manchuria.

He made his way to the United States via Canada (where the immigration process changed the name to Selcer), and a fortunate arranged marriage provided the opportunity to raise a family, and, with his wife, run a business. His children were often embarrassed by his accent, his foreign ways, and a certain coarseness of manner.

No one expected that this man, in his middle years, would become a hero of sorts. Without explanation, soon after the close of WWII, Chaim (now long known as Hyman), became involved for about eighteen months as a worker for the entities that would soon help bring forth the State of Israel. This man, who never had a birth certificate, somehow, with his sophisticated and well-connected Ohio friend Herschel Bloom, worked for the cooperating Jewish organizations that would change the history of the Middle East.

They were part of Aliya Bet, the secret organization that created a secret Jewish fleet for the purpose of facilitating Jewish immigration to Palestine, a crucial step toward undermining the power of the British Mandate for Palestine, which favored other political outcomes for the remains of the former Ottoman empire.

This part of the story is told, long after Hyman’s death, by Bloom, who is questioned relentlessly by Hyman’s younger son, Lester. Lester had been a resentful son growing up in the shadow of his older brother Ben. Just like Chaim had grown up in the shadow of Shmuel. Lester never could please his father; never received praise, encouragement, or even useful answers to his questions. His understanding of his father is modified through hearing Bloom’s narrative of courage and commitment.

This brief stretch of time within the overall narrative includes a romantic subplot in Hyman’s relationship with an attractive woman, Leila, he meets on Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz that absorbed many newcomers to nascent Israel.

Mr. Selcer’s prose has an abundance of descriptive power. He is able to put his complexly-drawn characters into vivid, realistic settings across the decades of his fable-like tale. The author is also able to set forth the historical issues and events with clarity and precision. Moving as well is his handling of the various characters emotional ups and downs.

Is Lester, who is the novel’s primary first-person narrator, actually David Selcer in disguise? It sometimes seems that way. But no: David Selcer is the son of Lester and thus the inventor of the needed fictional answers to the narrative’s questions that would otherwise go unanswered.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A former Ohioan, David Selcer now lives in Sarasota, Florida with his wife, where he decides employment cases for federal agencies as a Federal Agency Decision Writer. Always a buckeye, the Buckeye Barrister (lead character in Selcer’s 4-part mystery series) is an avid OSU fan. Another of his books is the historical novel Lincoln’s Hat and the Tea Movement’s Anger.

This review first appeared in the May-June 2020 issues Federation Star (Jewish Federation of Greater Naples), L’Chayim (Jewish Federation Lee and Charlotte Counties, and The Jewish News (Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee).  It was also expected to run in my Florida Weekly “Florida Writers” column, but that column, if not dead, is on hiatus. 

The queen of the cozy mystery pens another suspense-filled delight

A “Florida Writers” Review by Phil Jason

Easter Hair Hunt, by Nancy J. Cohen. Orange Grove Press. 304 pages. Trade paperback $14.99.

Family, friends, and community – that’s what Ms. Cohen’s novels are all about, just as much as they are about crime and its detection. The blend is intoxicating. This latest addition to her Bad Hair Day mystery series is bound to please her large body of readers. Her main character, hair salon owner Marla Vail, once again finds herself running into a crime that she can’t help investigating. After all, when good friend “Blinky” Morris, last seen in an Easter bunny suit during an Easter egg hunt, is suddenly missing, and the bunny suit is found worn by a corpse, what would any self-respecting amateur sleuth do?

Though Ms. Cohen’s narrative takes us to many locations, by far the main setting is Tremayne Manor, a restored, privately owned historic mansion. Blinky, her friend and customer, had agreed to meet her there.

The owner of the mansion, Lacey Tremayne, had turned the estate into a business – a venue for special events like the Easter egg hunt for children with an accompanying fundraiser. The mansion is filled with gorgeous and tempting objets d’art collections. Marla suspects that the expense of purchasing and maintaining this showplace required that it become an income producer as well as a private residence.

There are signs that the balance sheet is on the negative side. In part, this is because the staff is rather large. However, there are signs that money is not being handled well. Could there be some crooked employees? Would any of these speculations shed light on Blinky’s disappearance or on the murder of the person found garbed in Blinky’s bunny suit?

Marla’s husband, police detective Dalton Vail, is soon on both cases: the murder and the disappearance. As ever, he is respective of Marla’s investigative skills while concerned about her safety, especially as she is now in the late stages of pregnancy with their first child.

Soon enough, there are signs of items missing as well as rare items having been replace my imitations. Marla finds her way of asking productive questions, even if they sometimes become accusatory. She thinks out loud with her friends, testing theories about means, motive, and opportunities of staff members and others who are frequently at the mansion. These include Lacey’s secretive son Daniel; Steve, the person who heads up security; the café manager; the beekeeper, those who attend to the estate’s copious plantings; Heather the head docent to oversees tours of the mansion; and many others.

That’s a lot of interviewing to do without getting people upset, but Marla holds her own when the conversation gets testy. Suspense? There is plenty of it, and the suspense thermometer heats up the investigations (both Marla’s and Dalton’s) uncover more and mores surprises.

By the way, there is a second murder.

Marla’s characteristically busy life is complicated by several other concerns beyond her pregnancy. Her mother Anita’s remarriage is pending, Marla will organize much of the Easter holiday feasting, and – don’t you know – she has a business to run. She also has become a kind of second mother to Dalton’s teenage daughter Brianna.

Marla is connected to so many people in so many ways. She is a nexus in the world of her South Florida suburban community, and through her Ms. Cohen brings that imaginary Broward County community fully to life.

In what has become a hallmark of cozy mystery writing, of which Nancy J. Cohen is the undisputed queen, readers will find a lot about preparing food, including an appendix of recipes.

Titles in Ms. Cohen’s “Bad Hair Day” series have been named Best Cozy Mystery by Suspense Magazine, won a Readers’ Favorite gold medal and a RONE Award, placed first in the Chanticleer International Book Awards and third in the Arizona Literary Awards. Nancy’s instructional guide, Writing the Cozy Mystery, was nominated for an Agatha Award, won first place in the Royal Palm Literary Awards and the TopShelf Magazine Book Awards and a gold medal in the President’s Book Awards. Active in the writing community, Nancy has served as president of Florida Romance Writers and Mystery Writers of America Florida Chapter. When not busy writing, she enjoys cooking, fine dining, cruising, and visiting Disney World.

Note: This review was accepted for publication by Florida Weekly,  in my “Florida Writers'” column, but FW has stopped using many freelancers, including yours truly. “Florida Writers” reviews, like this one, will continue to appear on this blog from time to time. 

White’s Doc Ford has been called an “enduring hero.” Long may he endure

Review by Phil Jason (accepted for publication in Florida Weekly, but freelancers like me are on forced hiatus)

Salt River, by Randy Wayne White. Putman. 368 pages. Hardcover $27.00.

Several centers of interest intertwine to provide an engaging addition to the Doc Ford series. This 26^th contribution to the series, coming two years after “Caribbean Rim,” shows that Mr. White has not lost his touch and is still among the elite thriller writers in the nation. 

Readers new to Randy Wayne White (hereafter RWW) need to know just a few things about his Doc Ford character. Doc is a marine biologist with an independent practice. He works, off and on, for a beyond top secret government agency. He is a skilled and avid fisherman with a love of boats and great skills of navigation and employment of shipboard gadgetry. He has an on and off romance with a female fishing guide, the beautiful and independent Hannah Smith (title character of four RWW novels). He has a middle-aged hippy-type friend named Tomlinson.  He loves his home territory of Florida’s Sanibel Island. He’s good with guns.

So what’s happening in “Salt River?” Doc has recently found himself in the possession of a horde of rare Spanish coins that he has wrestled away from disreputable treasure hunter. Shady government employees, one of them is IRS agent Leo Alomar and the other a Nassau customs agent Rayvon Darwin, “a mobster in uniform,” are looking for the leverage that will make Doc want to “share” his treasure. Doc’s skill set, we must assume, is up to the task of avoiding any traps set by these unscrupulous men.

Tomlinson has discovered that his youthful adventure “donating” to a for-profit sperm bank has created a growing family of young adults with Tomlinson DNA. These offspring have found each other and are looking for more siblings. They are planning an event at which daddy Tomlinson will get to know them. It’s not clear just what the motive of each happens to be. Tomlinson is particularly concerned about the motives of Deville, one of the young men.

Randy Wayne White Photo by Brian Tietz

One of Tomlinson’s seed, a beautiful young woman named Delia, makes a play for Doc’s attention and more. She knows how close Doc and Tomlinson have been for many years, and she has a dose of emotional instability that is dangerous to herself and to Doc. She can tease, she can attract sympathy, she is vulnerable, and she is also ashamed of her propensities.

Doc better be careful, especially as his relationship with Hannah Smith is not going as he would like. He fathered Hannah’s child and is working hard, and effectively, to prove himself a good father to their young son, who lives with Hannah. But Hannah is leary of Doc’s behavior. Too often he must fabricate stories to cover his disappearances when called to duty by that clandestine agency. Hannah knows when he’s fibbing. Delia’s presence doesn’t help matters.

RWW’s books do a fine job of mixing the familiar with the less familiar. He makes the Dinken’s Bay Marina setting in SW Florida an attractive place to live and work. The lifestyle is casual, the friendships pleasurable. Readers can watch Doc in his laboratory, housed at the marina, as he works on his scientific projects. His friend Mack runs the marina with a sure hand, keeping things dependably relaxing.

Mr. White paints this little world of fishermen and boaters with indelible hues. Sometimes danger shows up at or near the marina, but most often the danger is somewhere else and for one reason or another Doc is driven to contend with it.

RWW’s fans expect to be exposed to interesting locals in the SW Florida area and also the Caribbean islands. His secret life takes him to many places, and in this novel establishing a faux identity as Morris Berg is part of the tradecraft that keeps the plot humming.

RWW draws his familiar and new characters with confidence. He makes their individual voices and speech patterns distinctive. After a while, the alert reader will know who’s talking without the names being mentioned.

Doc remains as multi-dimensional as ever. A true friend, a man of courage and varied skills. A man with the self-knowledge that leads to an appropriate humility. His future with Hannah remains cloudy. Tomlinson’s zaniness remains outlandish and a constant text for Doc’s patience.

After the two-year wait, it’s good to have Doc back and in good form.

Mystery of Lord Byron’s daughter drives fascinating historical novel

A Shadowed Fate, by Marty Ambrose. Severn House. 192 pp. Hardcover $28.99.

Reviewed by Phil Jason  (review accepted by Florida Weekly, but fate  otherwise unknown). Please enjoy.

In this second book in her series, which promises to bring a large and avid readership, Ambrose has retooled a bit, changing the name of the series from The Claire Clairemont Mysteries to the Lord Byron Mystery Series. What’s in a name? Like the earlier “Claire’s Last Secret,” secrets play a large role in the plot and the motives of the character. This one could be called Edward Trelawny’s Secret, as his decade’s long subterfuge is now confessed, explained, and teeters on the edge of being forgiven. 

Claire, the main character, from whose point of view most of the book is narrated, seems to live both in the present time (July 1873) and the much earlier time of her youth and memories (1820-21).

Claire spent much of her life as young woman hanging out with the fashionable Byron-Shelley crowd of writers along with her stepsister Mary Shelley. This young British nobility of the arts lived as expatriates in Italy. Claire had little in the way of financial resources, but as part of this fashionable crowd, which also included Edward Trelawny, she made do.

Trelawny, who wrote a biography of Byron, was her would-be lover; but for Claire, Byron was the real thing. So much so that she gave him a child, Allegra, whose fate is the central question of the story.

Marty Ambrose

In the novel’s present time, Trelawny approaches the aging Claire with a confession of sorts. He breaks promises he had made to the long-deceased Byron that suggest that Allegra, thought to have perished in the near destruction of the convent in which she had been brought up, may have survived.

Byron had placed her there for her protection. A man who had many enemies through his role in the liberation of Greece and for other reasons, he wanted to protect his daughter from those enemies. Those who might be after Allegra would also be after her mother, and, indeed, there are many signs of nefarious doings, including attempts to rob Claire of her handful of papers and artifacts that could be sold for a significant price. These include originals of some of Byron’s writings and a rare drawing. This little horde was Claire’s assurance of some income as she would need it through the remaining years her life.

Along with the fact that Ambrose’s prose captures the nature of Claire and the other characters marvelously, readers are given the opportunity to get into their heads in attractive ways. A series of passages reveal Claire reading or remembering passages from Byron’s diary. Thus. we get to know Byron. In a few strategically placed passages, we are let into Allegra’s thought as the girl living a lonely, parentless life in the convent.  Her father, who she remembers, dares not visit her.

Ambrose shapes the action so that a visit to the convent is inevitable. Claire receives promises from the leader of the institution to check records with the hope of shedding light on Allegra’s fortunes. Is she still alive but hidden and protected in some other way? Did she indeed, perish in the convent catastrophe? Is there anyone else to turn to for information? There is, however all of her traveling to find the sought-for answers seem to be journeys in which she is being watched and shadowed.

Claire’s last hopes are the convent’s superior and the woman whom Byron fell in love with after ending his relationship with Claire. Teresa, equal in age to Claire, invites Claire to visit. She proves to be one of the many finely drawn minor characters that Ambrose weaves into the story. However, the meetings between the two women, pleasant duos of sympathetic hearts and minds, bring no resolution.

Other finely drawn secondary characters include Claire’s niece Paula, whom with her lover Raphael and young daughter Georgiana constitute Claire’s household. But it is Edward Trelawny, on hand through most of the novel, and determined to prove himself to Claire, who is the most fully developed after Claire herself

If you’re a fan of history, romance, and fictional biography, Marty Ambrose will keep you fully engaged with her uniquely orchestrated and poetically cast novel. Moreover, Ambrose provides a remarkable portrait of Italy during the fifty-year stretch in which her plot about Claire’s life and aspirations develops.

 

An unlikely hero makes the best of his shortcomings

Trouble in Mind, by Michael Wiley. Severn House. 224 pages. Hardcover $28.99.

Mr. Wiley has returned to the Chicago setting to launch the Sam Kelson Mystery Series. His recent books have been set in Jacksonville, where he teaches at the University of North Florida. His Shamus Award-winning Joe Kozmarsky Series was also set in Chicago. The author’s new main character is an unlikely hero battling with handicaps that make his exploits particularly intriguing and sometimes comical. 

Sam’s last assignment on the Chicago Police Force involved a young and highly successful drug peddler nicknamed Bicho (Spanish for Bug). Attempting to lead an undercover narcotics team to make an arrest, Sam exchanged gunfire with Bicho and killed him. Cop and crook had fired at the same time, and the bullet that entered Sam’s brain changed his life.

When Sam is rushed to the hospital, his police buddy, Toselli, breaths enough oxygen into him to save his life.

Two years later, Sam is running a low-end private eye business. He admits to his clients that among his shortcomings is his inability to keep a secret. This is one outcome of the bullet that went into his left frontal lobe. He also is compelled to answer unasked questions and to laugh for no obvious reason. He has trouble navigating doorways. These and other results of his near-fatal wounding are on display throughout the story, provoking sympathy and smirks. His ability to function well enough and his desire to help people makes him a one-of-a-kind hero.

Wiley

When Trina Felbanks become Sam’s client, his situation quickly takes a turn for the worse. Trina asks him to find out if her brother, a pharmacist, had been dealing drugs. When Sam shows up at Christian Felbanks’ home, he at first doesn’t find any sign of it being a place where drugs are being hidden, manufactured, or sold. However, he does make a shocking discovery: someone has put a bullet hole in Mr. Felbanks’ head. Just as Sam makes this discovery, a SWAT team rushes in and arrests Sam for the murder. Clearly, he has been set up, and his client must have played a role in this charade. Arrested on suspicion of murder, he makes an even more startling discovery concerning his client’s identity.

Who is the murderer and why has Sam been chosen as the fall guy? . . .

To read the entire review, as it appears in the March 25, 2020 Fort Myers Florida Weekly and the March 26 Naples, Bonita Springs, Charlotte County, and Venice editions, click here:  Trouble in Mind

Fierce tornadoes complicate the work of well-trained rescue dogs

Review by Phil Jason

Desperate Creed, by Alex Kava. Prairie Wind Publishing. 320 pages. Hardcover $27.99.

The fifth title in the Ryder Creed Series has a bit of everything, including deadly politics, lost and found souls, broken and repaired families, and the uncanny efficiency of well-trained search and rescue dogs. The latter interest is the vital center of the whole series, with the magical coupling of trainer and K-9 presented once again in a moving, dynamic fashion.

The added complication in this installment is the overwhelming power of fierce tornadoes that shows no respect for man, beast, roads, buildings, or anything else in its way. Ms. Kava’s description of this deadly series of tornadoes in Alabama, the damage done, and the human responses is truly magnificent. She scribes a poetry of natural disaster.

Frankie Russo works for a big Chicago advertising firm where she is paired with a young hotshot named Tyler. He and his friend Deacon Kaye plan to do an analysis of cereal and breakfast bars from Carson Foods. Tyler suspects that the glyphosate used in their products is toxic. Tyler has been hacking the company’s emails, discovering problems including the involvement of a U.S. Senator in plans to send Carson’s products worldwide. Having snuck in, electronically, to the corridors of power, Tyler has made himself a possible target, and possibly Frankie as well. Smart phone email exchanges between Frankie and Tyler have made them easy to locate. Two men have tracked Tylor down, and his phone connection to Frankie makes her vulnerable. They know too much. Plot line one is now rolling.

At his Florida Panhandle K-9 training facility, Ryder Creed is keeping an eye on his sister Brodie, recently saved from long term, mind-altering incarceration. Learning to work with Ryder’s dogs is an important part of her therapy, as is a reunification with her real mother, not the woman who had terrorized her for decades. Plot line two: will this work out? What else does Brodie need? . . .

To read the full review, as it appears in the March 11, 2020 Fort Myers Florida Weekly and the March 12 Naples, Bonita Springs, Charlotte County, Palm Beach, and Venice editions,  click here: Desperate Creed

Florida Man

Is Tim Dorsey the literary incarnation of Florida Man?

Tim Dorsey’s latest addition to the Serge Storms saga, Naked Came the Florida Man, takes on the challenge of uncovering a Florida that few readers – or writers – know well. He offers a loony look at a momentous hurricane, a tour of unusual cemeteries, as well as some sobering moments at a mass grave in Palm Beach County where the remains of African Americans killed by an earlier hurricane are buried. He pays homage to the that great icon of Florida culture – Flipper the dolphin. He makes us feel the threat and horror of the sugar cane fields and of those buried beneath – victims, perhaps, of the boogeyman who haunted those fields. Was he just a figment of local children’s imagination, or is he with us even today, the fabled Florida Man just waiting to strike?

Tim Dorsey

 

If you like zany mysteries, you’d better latch onto this one and see how Serge investigates a particularly weird case. Seeming like a nutcase is part of Serge’s skill set, and he employs it with unexpected results.

Readers will appreciate the 1960s nostalgia that winds through the book, and they will be imaginatively following that gold ’69 Plymouth Satellite that caries Serge and his buddy Coleman forward and backward in time and space. Along the way he pays homage to Florida writer Zora Neale Hurston and her influence on Georgia writer Alice Walker.

The author, a Tampa resident, starts Serge’s magical mystery tour in Key West and gets his heroes and their imaginary followers up to Pahokee and beyond. He’ll keep you smiling and also scratching your head.

Join the fun. Look out for those sections labeled “Four Years Earlier” and don’t trip over the changes of direction.

The entire article, as it appears in the March – April 2020 Fort Myers Magazine, includes an extended Q & A section and some Dorsey biography.

You can get there by clicking on Florida Man

 

Disease, exhaustion, and starvation threaten family in wartime Burma

No Long Goodbyes, by Pauline Hayton. PH Publishing. 311 pages. Trade paperback $14.99.

If ever a book gave inspiring testimony to courage, the spirit of adventure, and basic human kindness, Pauline Hayton’s new historical novel is such a book. Her story follows a group of people caught up in the nightmare consequences of Japan’s invasion of Burma, at this time a British colony, in 1942.

This little-known but horrific slice of WWII reveals how armed nationalistic endeavor can conspire with natural forces and hazardous terrain to push those caught in such a maelstrom to – and beyond – their limits.

Pauline Hayton

Ms. Hayton’s story, however, is not rooted in wartime alliances, strategies, or rationales, but in how people, unexpectedly trapped by circumstances beyond control, can find strength, resilience, and an angelic sense of purpose in helping one another. Though it is necessary for them to band together, there is something spiritual going on in their commitment to sacrifice for the common good.

This book, then, is a love story on many levels. It explores broken, repaired, and redesigned families. It shows how people of different backgrounds, races, and cultures can become attached to one another through the strength of their common humanity. It demonstrates that a family does not have to be a bonded by blood. It assures us that second chances can be realized and that the pains of loss and feared loss can be overcome.

The central figure is Kate Cavanagh, a British woman in her late twenties recovering from the death of her late husband who committed suicide after murdering their child – in part because the child was not biologically his.

Deciding to restart her life in Burma, Kate does well socially. She encounters and falls in love with Jack Bellamy, a recent widower with two small children. Jack is the head of a tea plantation. The two marry, but soon find themselves attempting to flee the Japanese forces, the natural forces of endless rain and cold, the scarcity of nourishment and clean water, the extremely dangerous mountain ranges, the threat of hungry wildlife, and the omnipresent risk of deadly disease.

The destination for safety is India, and the newly formed family, along with their Indian nursemaid, could never have imagined what lay ahead. . . .

To read the entire review, as it appears in the February 27, 2020 Naples, Bonita Springs, and Palm Beach editions of Florida Weekly, the March 4 Fort Myers and March 5 Charlotte County editions, click here: No Long Goodbyes

Superb thriller explores the lasting effects of trauma

The Stranger Inside, by Lisa Unger. Park Row Books. 384 pages. Hardcover $26.99.

Ms. Unger had done it again. She’s taken her readers to places that no one should have to enter, and she’s made it extremely difficult for them to escape from the spell cast by her soaring skill and fright-filled imagination.

A major question that the book explores is to what degree trauma can shape, perhaps misshape, identity and functionality. The premise involves three friends knocking on the door of their teen years who are engaged by a demonic lost soul (himself a trauma victim) who had been following one of them around. The central character is Rain Winter (who has other names). Her friends are Tess and Hank – who is also her admirer and rescuer.

Tess loses her life in the madman’s attack. Rain and Hank survive, the trauma having reshaped their lives in somewhat different ways. Each must deal with “the stranger within,” a haunted, stunted self that cannot quite be covered over by the more normal self – the self that has built a constructive life but is never completely free.

The abductor-murderer, considered a victim himself, served jail time for his crimes. But he, like several other madmen whose crimes had reached the media, had met a violent death. It seems like vigilante justice is getting these perverts off the streets. Are serial vigilante killers the good guys or just more bad guys?

Lisa Unger

When readers meet Rain, she is on hiatus from her work as a journalist to take care of her young daughter. But the news about possible vigilante justice keeps pulling her back to the memories imbedded in and surrounded by her traumatic experience. She needs to tell that story.

Rain is literally haunted by Hank, whose demons seem more out of control and who has a neediness that only Rain seems likely to understand and alleviate. Though he has established himself as a therapist and does important work, especially with children, he has not yet been able to fully heal himself.

Ms. Unger’s art is amazing in how she handles the special community of the three schoolmates who were attacked so long ago. Chapters begin with the voice or thought stream of one of the three. Readers cannot always be sure which one it is until the scene’s momentum develops. Each seems to need a psychic rendezvous with the others. . . .

To read the entire review, as it appears in the February 12, 2020 Fort Myers Florida Weekly and the February 13 Naples, Bonita Springs, Palm Beach, Charlotte County, and Venice editions, click here:  The Stranger Inside