Review: Great premise with problematic execution
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 18, 2013
Here we have a great premise for a series, with the retired schoolteacher and the small-town cop banding together to solve mysteries, and I appreciated the picture-postcard Maine setting as well. However, I think the book shows its roots as a first novel----it isn't badly written, but could use a little more polish. (And really, an editor should have told the author to remove just about every exclamation point from this manuscript---as a rule, I would say that novels simply shouldn't contain too many exclamation points---practically NONE, in fact, unless they're used in dialogue.)Now, this is a solid mystery, and not a romance---no love scenes here. And that's fine---however, I think a definite shortcoming of the book was the lack of ALL emotional content. It's as if the author is uncomfortable with writing about relationships. I've read other gay-themed mysteries that focus on a decent whodunnit while also delving into the private life of the main characters, and they've been quite satisfying. The complete lack of detail regarding the relationship between Jesse and Tim in this book is rather off-putting, actually, and difficult to understand.It's a great set-up for some decent drama---here you have two old school acquaintances getting to know one another again after thirty-five years. But the way the book handles their initial hook-up is baffling: Tim comes over to dinner at Jesse's place one evening, without Jesse even knowing Tim is gay---and then there's a jump-cut to the next morning with Tim coming out of Jesse's shower, and apparently they're now a couple. What the heck??! This would have been a great opportunity for a long dialogue scene which could have been played in any number of different ways. No, I'm not asking for a sex scene---but I would like to know how these two ended up together, what they said to one another---there is NOTHING in the text to indicate how this played out.Likewise, a little later in the plot Tim's eighteen-year-old daughter comes home from visiting her mother and finds Jesse at Tim's place. Suddenly she not only finds out her father is gay, but that he's actively involved with another man----great opportunity for drama, no? Well---apparently not---because once again this is never explored---we never do get to know what happens, how she reacts.So for me this is a problem---I'm not asking for the novel to turn into a torrid romance, and I have no problem at all about there being zero explicit content. But I would like to know a little more about the relationship of the protagonists, how it develops and plays out; I'd like a little more emotional content in the book, in addition to the mystery. So, as such I wasn't really satisfied with this in the end, and I'm giving it a mixed review.This is the first of several mysteries in a series, and I am curious to know what happens next---and if the author's writing style shows any development. But, I'm not sure whether I want to continue if the other books also ignore the relationship as thoroughly as this one did.