Review: `beautiful hunting'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 6, 2014
Arizona author William H. Lovejoy Mr. Lovejoy was an army brat so he lived in Nebraska, Montana and Colorado during his childhood. A graduate from Colorado State University, he is a Vietnam veteran. After working his way through college, he was for many years a college professor before moving into the administration field as a college president. H e is Vice Chancellor Emeritus from Mojave Community College. He also worked for a while as a management consultant. Under his own name he is best known as an accomplished writer of techno-thrillers: he is the author of two dozen thriller, suspense, and mystery novels with publications in English, Japanese, Spanish, and Hebrew. Lovejoy is a member of the Mystery Writers of America.BELLE CHASSE is a mystery that explores deadly sunken treasure. The name of the book is the name of the river boat docked in the suburbs of New Orleans that serves as the home and office bas of former Navy SEAL Glenn Kenney turned boat salesman whose life affect is somewhat flattened by his past experiences with both the Seals and with a divorce.  Kenney encounters Detective Sergeant Connie Mellor of the New Orleans Police Department when his ex-wife Debra is found murdered. But Keeney's past of front edge action surfaces and when Mellor and the police fail to move forward in finding Debra's killer, Glenn takes the forefront, discovering that what the police have called a jealousy motivated slaying has other permutations: Kenney comes to realize his knowledge of Debra was incomplete. Kenney begins to dig into Debra's past and then shares that information with Mellor and the hunt for the perpetrator stretches from the banks of the Mississippi River to the depths of the Caribbean Sea and uncovers a brand new kind of sunken treasure.Not only does Lovejoy know how to built tension so integral to successful mysteries, but also his prose rings with atmosphere unlike many of his colleagues who write in this vein. The opening words of his story are as follows: 'The August night dripped with magnolia-scented humidity like Bourbon Street at night dripped with clear riffs from baritone saxophones. A sweet clarinet rippled in a Persian marketplace. Heat and sweat and laughter and the smell of popcorn. Old New Orleans tried so hard to hang onto its aristocratic past and its jazzy glory with clenched talons, but Katrina had ripped the guts out of most of it. The new age bopped along the packed sidewalks, rap music pounding through ear buds plugged into thirty percent of the ears Kenney passed. He figured their hearing would be gone by age forty.' It is this additional bonus that makes the reader want to explore more of William H. Lovejoy's output. This is a very well crafted mystery thriller. Grady Harp, May 14