Review: Perplexing presentation
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2011
Trial by Fury,  e-book edition by Michael Wallace is a very short vignette of a section of the life of a young member of a segregated Mormon group. The author states "This novella may be read out of sequence to the novels The Righteous series as it doesn't rely on information from any other books".Abraham Christianson, at the age of seventeen, is ordered by his uncle, an elder of the church, to kill a dissident. Shaken by the order, the boy remonstrates with his uncle and therein lies the plot.The rest of the short book contains an excerpt from Wallace's new WW II thriller "THE RED ROOSTER".To be quite frank, I don't understand why this particular piece was published as a free-standing book. The plot simply is to present the result of an action taken by the boy, and it is done in a very cursory manner. Interest in the introduction to his new novel probably suffers from this reader's dissatisfaction with the  presentation of the supposed main reason for reading the book.In summary, the idea of presenting a vignette to interest a reader in following a series is an excellent idea. However, when encountered previously, the presentation has been a worthwhile introduction. Reading this book really serves no purpose except to  introduce the reader to a character in a series, when according to the author's statement, "...the first part of this story is included as background in book #3, THE WICKED (June 2011)". SO... to reiterate, why set this forth as a free-standing publication? Reviewed by John H. Manhold, award winning fiction/non-fiction author