Review: Captivating! Enthralling! Fascinating!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 13, 2014
After plunging into the wonderfully colorful and bright world of the people of the imaginary little coastal town of Deep Cove, I’m back in the real world. The journey was fascinating, intense, full of intrigue, fun and jokes, and sometimes shocking – for it’s difficult to pin down Welcome to Deep Cove by Grant T. Reed to one particular genre. It has the slapstick humor in the best traditions of a P. G. Wodehouse novel, action – thrilling, edge-of-the-seat, nail biting, heroic action – straight out of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, friendship, loyalty and camaraderie – as seen in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a fantastic story, told beautifully, in the best traditions of any of the classics. Completing the book leaves you on a high and a feeling of being happy with the world, imagining yourself to be one of its great heroes – the admirable Commander Rowgar, the intelligent Garrett or the snarky dragon Merle.The plot is intricate, and while I’ll talk about it briefly, it’s best for other readers to go through the book and experience the wonderful twists and turns, and the splendid writing on their own. We are in an imaginary world of 2 warring nations, Vellia and Ponce, in an uncertain era, with robots and talking animals, dragons and ogres, but placed in a medieval period, with Machiavellian intrigues, plots and mysteries, brutal tortures and murders, hired assassins and mafia type gangs.Our heroes, each of who have an independent storyline of their own, unrelated to each other, are the courageous, utterly fearless and selfless Commander Rowgar, who leads a failed mission to release Vellian POWs from a  high security Poncean prison, and the charming, selfish, funny down on his luck Private Investigator Garrett – who is more than he appears, as we find out later in the book. We meet Garrett’s equally interesting friends, the cynical talking dragon with an acerbic wit, Merle and their manservant (just don’t call him that!), Who does their laundry and comically doubles up as a prize fighter, the robot P.C.........Merle and P.C completely own this book with their humor, although P.C’s humor is completely unintentional. There’s also a love interest (Garrett’s) in form of Coral. Garrett gets mixed up in gang wars, murders and mysteries by coming under the command of a cunning and shrewd small time Mafia don, Kline and we meet Kline’s very interesting henchmen, including the retarded giant Vic, the smart talking  ogre Maury, the nice kid B.S and others.Bottom line : The book is absolutely un-put-down-able, and the great news is that it’s only the first of a series. I’ll definitely pounce on the next book by the writer, Grant Reed.