Book Review - Reunion by Carl Brookins

Reunion
Carl Brookins
ISBN: 978-1-59080-668-5
Echelon Press


This book straddles the fence between being a cozy and a hard-boiled tale. Jack Marston, former investigator for the U.S. Navy, is now director of student services at a small college in Minneapolis, so he doesn't consider himself a law-enforcement officer anymore, but he keeps getting pulled into investigations in this series that debuted with Bloody Halls.  In Reunion, Jack talks his girlfriend, Lori Jacobs, into attending her 20th class reunion in hopes of learning more about her, only to be thrust into another investigation when one of her former classmates is found murdered.

The lighter side of the story revolves around introducing the players and the reunion, which isn't a bad thing if your reading tastes lean more toward the cozy. In some places I also thought things happened a bit too easily in terms of finding out important information, but the interplay between characters was good enough to keep me connected to the story, and I did really enjoy the relationship between Jack Marston and Lori.

The tangle of underhanded business dealings from the past that connect to the current murders adds to the drama and suspense, and the reader is led down a few blind alleys until the final outcome.  I will say Brookins kept me guessing through most of the story and the tension did pick up toward the end. As Marston gets closer to solving a five-year-old murder, as well as finding out who is responsible for killing people at Lori's class reunion, the danger mounts for him and Lori.

In addition to writing and reviewing mysteries, Carl Brookins is an avid recreational sailor. With his wife and friends he has sailed in many locations across the world. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Private Eye Writers of America.
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FTC Disclaimer: The author sent me a copy of this book, just like he probably sent one to the New York Times in hopes of a review. That is the way it is done in the business. I am free to ignore the request for a review, the same as the guy from the New York Times. No money is slipped under any table and none of us get seriously rich by doing reviews. Was I influenced by the fact that Carl Brookins writes reviews that he lets me share here? Probably, but only because I find his writing good enough to share.

The Evolution of a Writer

Please help me welcome Robert Bennett to It's Not All Gravy. 

How does someone go from being a social worker to writing mystery fiction full time?  In my case it was an accident, literally.

In 1988 I was working as a social worker in a group home for mentally challenged men in the Bronx, NY. It was my first job out of grad school and I really enjoyed it.  I was making decent money.  My boss liked me and thought I was doing a good job.  My guys and I had a great relationship. Most importantly, I felt like I was making a real difference in their lives.  I was helping them learn daily living skills.  I was helping them to get an education.  For someone who’d always wanted to improve the lives of the disenfranchised masses of our society this was the perfect job.  But, in July, it all came crashing down.

Despite what you may have heard, car accidents are no fun.  In fact mine was the least fun thirty seconds I’d ever spent in my life.  Yup, that’s all it took to change my life completely…one half of a minute.

I was coming home from a girlfriend’s home in Pennsylvania, driving on a highway I’d driven on a couple of dozen times, when I heard tires screeching behind me. I remember looking in the rearview mirror and seeing a car stopped on the road to the left of me.  A few seconds later a vehicle crashed into me from behind.  My metal chariot spun around and boom, I was hit again. This second attack pushed me against the guard rail facing oncoming traffic. Fortunately the guy who hit me, not the one who caused the accident (he was long gone and probably oblivious to what he’d caused), was an off-duty EMT driver. He orchestrated everything post-accident. The hospital released me after a cursory exam, and I went home to bed.

Skip ahead a few months, during which time I’d left my job, lost my girlfriend, and had several surgeries on my spine. I had no idea what the rest of my life would be like. One night my mother brought home a notice for classes at a place called The New York Studio for Writers. I made a phone call.

Since then I’ve written magazine articles about what I call “issues of disability,” everything from sports to politics.  I write about people who challenge societal views of what we commonly, and mistakenly, call ‘disabilities’ and ‘handicaps.’  I write about technology that helps people with disabilities lead better, easier, more productive lives.  I write about social and physical barriers, and how to circumnavigate them.

One of my articles for a magazine called Virtual Reality Special Report, was about a device that combined GPS and virtual reality technologies to allow blind people to navigate through their world.  That sparked my creative interests like no other topic previously had. What, I wondered, would happen if that device malfunctioned so that the user would not “see” the world immediately around him but, instead, would throw him off by a few blocks?  What would happen if what he “saw” was a murder taking place?  How would he deal with this information?  How would the police react if he decided to inform them?  You’re blind, they’d say.  How can you see anything?  You were a few blocks away from this alleged incident, they’d continue.  How could you know anything about it?

Welcome to the travails of Douglas Abledan and his adventures in my Blind Traveler mystery series. This was the setup for my first novel, Blind Traveler Down a Dark River (pub’d 2004).  Book two, Blind Traveler’s Blues, was just accepted as an ebook to be published by Echelon Press.

And that is how a social worker can become a writer of mystery fiction.  Sometimes accidents happen for a reason!

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For more information about Robert and his work, visit his Web site  You can also meet him on his BLOG