Review: Awesome Fish Story!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 15, 2012
"Brood" by Lars Guignard really doesn't fit any of the standard Fiction genres, so I've had to come up with a new one. From now on, "Brood" will be classified simply as "Awesome Fiction". Sterling Strange is a Private Investigator; Nicky Lang, formerly a psychiatrist, is his assistant. Sterling's last name couldn't be a better fit for the case he's on in this book. In fact, his office should have "Strange Investigations" stenciled on the door, if it doesn't already.Contacted by the ex-wife of Walter Kronski, a disgraced marine biologist, Sterling agrees to try to find the man, who has been out of contact for three months. Last heard from in the fishing community of Fair Harbor, Alaska, Kronski is just one of 17 men, mostly fishermen, who have gone missing from Fair Harbor over the previous 11 months. Why has that not caught the attention of law enforcement personnel?Strange and Lang arrive in Fair Harbor to learn they are not at all welcome in the community. Fair Harbor is filled with hard working commercial fishermen. They have little interest in panty-waist city slickers poking their noses into things that don't concern them. Fortunately Strange has a friend in the FBI, so the local sheriff is basically ordered to cooperate with them. As far as Kronski is concerned, the whole community is apparently happy that he disappeared. But the other missing men all had one thing in common: each of them had lost fingers or toes in a fishing mishap just prior to going missing. Coincidence? Not likely.With barely nominal help from the sheriff, and outright hostility from everybody else, the two P.I.'s work on their own to find and follow up on clues. What they find is anything except what they hoped to find. They did locate the body of Kronski... but he looked more like a human-fish hybrid than anything else. And that was NOT the weirdest thing that happened in this novel! Official cover-ups dating back decades, government collusion, alien spaceships, bizarre events around every corner... Fair Harbor was a hotbed of the strange, the weird, and the bizarre.Will this be the final case for Strange and Lang? Have they finally gotten into something too deep to dig their way back out? Only by reading this book will you find out. I can assure you, though; once you start reading you won't be able to put it down until you finish it. I recommend this book to anyone who likes suspense, action, science fiction, or just plain awesome fiction! This one rates the full 5 stars.