Review: `Four little words that destroy a marriage, two lives and a family'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 30, 2013
Daniel Quentin Steele is the moniker for a Jacksonville author and native Floridian. A former educator, he has been a journalist and public relations professional. He has covered and reported on crime and cops, courts and trials in several Florida cities. He has worked as a speech writer and political and media consultant. He has had one novel published in the U.S. and Great Britain as well as short stories published in the U.S., Canada, Australia and England. With credentials like these it is no wonder he is able to probe into the darker aspects of all those who are sitting a the roundtable of crime - perpetrators, victims, lawyers (both defense and prosecutors), judges, and everyone else who steps on the stage as these nails of corruption flail about. Steele's major novel (WWWW is a set of four books, one story, of which this is the first installment, describes his tale best - and his version is worth repeating."The Long Fall" is the story of an obsessed and obsessive prosecutor in a North Florida county who has the major responsibility for putting bad people behind bars and keeping them there. It is the story of an average looking guy that loves a beautiful woman who is WAY out of his league and what happens when their marriage explodes, crashes and burns. It is the story of a beautiful woman who attracts men without effort and finally decides she's had enough of an absentee husband when there's a world of men out there that want her. And finds out it's not as easy as it looks to walk out on 20 years with a man who would walk through fire for you. It is thus a story of modern marriage and A MODERN marriage, a story of divorce and mid-life crisis and rebirth, the criminal justice system from the inside without political niceties and correctness, a story of cops and prosecutors and defenders and criminals. It's a story about sex and obsession and neglect and betrayal and emotional and sexual affairs, an adult love story, meaning adult in several senses. One sense is that it features adult language, which is what you think it is. The people in the novel - lawyers, professors, cops, criminals - talk the way people really talk in their private offices, in corridors and in bedrooms., literally. They use the `f' word a lot and the words that people actually use for sex and male and female genitalia. They also think about and work toward and have sex a lot. In another sense, it's a story about love after childbirth and boredom and jobs and responsibilities and 20 years of mind numbing routine and child rearing. It's the `rest of the story' after ` they lived happily ever after.' Call it `grown up love'.'Reading the prose of Daniel Quentin Steele involves the reader in a raw bite of life, but for all the ministrations of his language, at times overboard but always in keeping with the flavor of his story, we do indeed meet some credible if sad people clinging by their fingernails to what little of their lives that makes sense. It is a gutsy beginning of a tetralogy, and if step one entices, explore the rest of them. It is an acquired taste, and fortunately for Steele, a popular one! Grady Harp, September 13