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GOOD SOLDIER, A
by Jeffrey Marks
Silver Dagger Press, February 2003
181 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 1570722153


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The American Civil War being recently concluded, war hero U.S. Grant and his family are taking a brief holiday before being swept up in the political whirlwind of a presidential campaign. They plan to stop for a few days in the small town of Bethel, Ohio, to visit with old friends and family, but arrive to find one of those friends struck down in his prime and laid out in the family parlour.

Amid the distress of this event, Grant is bemused to notice that all four of his old friends from prewar days seem to have become, unaccountably, extremely wealthy. While he puzzles over this, Grant's young son turns up with a handful of solid gold coins, saying they were a gift from the dead man's children, yet when he attempts to return them to the widow, she denies all knowledge of them. Then another old friend meets an untimely end, and Grant discovers evidence that it was no accident.

There are several good points to this story. The identity of the murderer is reasonably mysterious; the history, too, is clearly well-researched. Unfortunately, the writing itself is undeniably poor; certainly it shows the lack of a good, brisk editor. The author contradicts himself repeatedly, as for example when describing Grant's reprobate father: "he managed to rankle people wherever he went", yet, in the very next paragraph, "[the people of Bethel] treated him like an old friend and royalty". As we watch Grant at his friend's funeral, we are told he "had not experienced many funerals in the previous four years", yet moments later: "Grant knew these proceedings all too well". Hmm - which is it? I often found myself backtracking as I read, attempting to reconcile these contradictions. My marginal notes frequently consist of the one word, "What?"

There is an odd, disjointed quality to the text, the characters are curiously flat, and, in a transgression peculiar to the historical novel, odds and ends of period detail are shoe-horned into the narrative with little regard for their relevance to the tale. Events that would have been sensational if true, such as the discovery of Jefferson Davis' journals of the last days of his administration, are introduced with no attempt to reconcile them with known history, straining credulity well past the breaking point. This is a story one wants to like, but in the event simply cannot.

Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, January 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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