About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

BLACK RIVER
by G. M. Ford
Avon Books, July 2002
308 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0380978741


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Frank Corso is a disgraced journalist who got a second chance in Seattle and made the most of it. He is a reclusive fellow, but a man who knows the underbelly of the world around him. He has been given exclusive rights, as a journalist. to attend a federal trial in Seattle, the third time that Nicholas Balagala has been tried for responsibility for the collapse of a hospital resulting numerous deaths. During the first trial the primary witnesses were murdered and at the second trial somehow the jury was tampered with. The new federal prosecutor is determined to put this man away and at the same time make his reputation.

Meanwhile an anonymous man is shot and then shot again by two other men. The second men take him and his truck and arrange to bury it where, presumably, it will never be found. A close friend of Corso, Meg Doughtery, a photographer, sees the same two men murder a third person in a deserted warehouse. She escapes from them but as she flees she is in a terrible accident and ends up in a coma. Frank is determined to find out what happened to her and as her story develops, so do events surrounding the trial.

This is the second book featuring Frank Corso. These novels are darker than Ford's earlier books. While there is violence aplenty, it is not necessarily gratuitous but every reader knows it is there. It is a bloodier, nastier Seattle than Leo Waterman and his merry band of homeless men ever inhabited. Bad things happen to good people.

Ford, as always, tells a extremely good story. The reader tends to lose herself in the events, racing through, white knuckled, longing to know what is going to happen next. He knows how to produce suspense and to keep readers involved. There really is not much of a mystery connected with the story, although the question of the identity of the first man to shoot the victim is not solved until the very end. But you do not read this book for the mystery as much as you do for the suspense and the opportunity to take a wild and exciting ride through the bleaker parts of Seattle.

The setting is very well done. Ford has made Seattle his own and serves up an intriguing, colorful, and riveting depiction of a enthralling city. We certainly see it in a different light after traversing it through this novel.

The characters are intriguing and while most are fairly two dimensional, Corso is more developed, carrying a load of guilt which he conceals quite well, wisecracking his way through the shoals and vicissitudes that he encounters.

Toward the end of the book, Corso talks about the Western novel in words which could easily apply to this crime novel as well:

It was much more ambiguous than I figured. It was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. There didn't seem to be any moral high ground. More like we all just got down in the swamp together and rolled around in the muck.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, September 2002

This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]