Tag: crime

Book Review: The Mountain Man’s Badge by Gary Corbin

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The Mountain Man's BadgeAbout the Book

Lehigh Carter never wanted to be sheriff. And he sure never wanted to arrest his new father-in-law for murder.

Mountain Man Lehigh Carter got talked into serving the unexpired term of disgraced long-time Mt. Hood County sheriff Buck Winters, hoping for a quiet nine months in office before the voters selected a new, permanent office-holder. But a few months into the job, poachers discover the body of Everett Downey, a sleazy local businessman, and the evidence points to Lehigh’s brand-new father-in-law, the once-powerful senator George McBride. To his chagrin and his new bride’s fury, Lehigh is forced to arrest George for the murder, and suddenly his happy marriage is on the rocks. Soon he’s living in a tent with only his two dogs for companionship.

While most people in Mt. Hood County appreciate Lehigh’s honesty and his willingness to fight the cronyism and corruption that have plagued Mt. Hood County law enforcement for decades, his desire for reform ruffles some important feathers. Lehigh finds himself fighting unseen enemies, determined to portray him as inept and more corrupt than his predecessor – even at the cost of protecting the integrity of the murder investigation. Even his own deputies seem intent on bringing back the old guard, and a series of evidence leaks put Lehigh’s reputation and ability to serve as sheriff in jeopardy.

Lehigh’s not a quitter, though, and with dogged persistence, begins to chip away at the investigation, discovering facts that don’t add up…and leads him to suspect why some of those most intent on removing him from office have reasons far more sinister than Lehigh’s reform agenda.  Can Lehigh uncover the truth behind Everett Downey’s murder without becoming the killer’s next victim?

Format: ebook (384 pp.)        Publisher: Double Diamond Publishing
Published: 20th June 2018     Genre: Crime, Mystery

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Mountain Man’s Badge on Goodreads

My Review

The Mountain Man’s Badge is the third book in the author’s Mountain Man Mysteries series, following on from The Mountain Man’s Dog and The Mountain Man’s Bride. I haven’t read the earlier books but, on the strength of this one, they now have a place on my wish-list. Although this third instalment can be enjoyed as a standalone, it does mention events in the earlier books so for full enjoyment I would recommend reading the series from the beginning.

The first chapter, set at a political fundraiser for interim Sheriff Lehigh Carter, allows the author to introduce key characters and reference events from the first two books in the series.   It’s soon clear that Lehigh has influential relatives, chiefly his father-in-law George McBride, but also some potentially powerful enemies. As events unfold, the reader learns that Mt. Hood County is a place of vested interests, corruption and score-settling.

The author does a great job of conveying the atmosphere of a small town, albeit one that seems overrun with greasy spoon diners, sleazy strip clubs and dingy sports bars. Furthermore, in this ‘small pond’ there are ‘big fish’ who believe they run the show, that they always will and who will stop at nothing – and I mean nothing – to cling on to their power and influence.

You can imagine how they feel about Lehigh‘s appointment as interim Sheriff. He’s honourable, decent and determined to root out the cronyism that has infected the office of Sheriff in the past. As he says early on in the book: ‘I’m gonna fix this place or get run out of town trying.’   This is despite the fact that he’s feels thrust into a role for which he is ill-equipped. What makes Lehigh such a likeable character is the fact that he does make a few rookie mistakes but he never loses his sense of what’s right, even if that means risking his marriage to bride of two years, Stacy.  It has to be said however that he goes through a few ‘long dark nights of the soul’ wondering if he’s doing the right thing.

As the investigation into the murder of local businessman Everett Downey progresses, readers may well begin to have their own suspicions about who is the true culprit but it transpires that getting the necessary proof is fraught with danger, for Lehigh in particular.  There are those involved who aren’t afraid to fight back, even if this means going outside the law or sacrificing others to keep themselves safe.  It also becomes clear that Lehigh cannot necessarily trust everyone around him.  The tension builds to a dramatic conclusion during which Lehigh comes to the surprising (to him) realisation that he has more support than he thought.

The author is a scriptwriter and this certainly shows when it comes to the dialogue in the book which is realistic, sharp and full of humour. It’s how real people talk to each other over coffee and a donut. I really enjoyed The Mountain Man’s Badge; it’s an engaging and well-crafted crime mystery with a likeable protagonist and which tackles that universal theme of the good guy fighting largely single-handed against the bad guys.

I received a review copy courtesy of the author in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Entertaining, suspenseful, mystery

Try something similar…Poor Boy Road by James L. Weaver (read my review here)

GaryCorbinAbout the Author

Gary Corbin is a writer, actor, and playwright in Camas, WA, a suburb of Portland, OR.  An award-winning playwright, several of his plays have been produced in the Portland, OR area, some of them multiple times. In addition to his own scripts, Gary writes, ghost-writes, and edits scripts. He specializes in tight, realistic dialogue involving sharply drawn, interesting characters in complex relationships.  Gary is a member of PDX Playwrights, the Portland Area Theater Alliance, the Willamette Writers Group and the Bar Noir Writers Workshop, and participates in workshops and conferences in the Portland, Oregon area.

A homebrewer as well as a maker of wine, mead, cider, and soft drinks, Gary is a member of the Oregon Brew Crew and a BJCP National Beer Judge. He loves to ski, cook, and garden, and hopes someday to train his dogs to obey. And when that doesn’t work, there’s always Renegade’s Paradise.

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Guest Post: ‘Researching The Great Darkness’ by Jim Kelly

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I read The Great Darkness by Jim Kelly a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it.  Set in Cambridge in 1939, The Great Darkness is the first in a new historical crime series.  You can read my full review here but, if you need a little enticement, I commented that the book would be perfect for fans of TV’s Foyles War.  Since I loved the book so much, I’m thrilled to welcome Jim Kelly to What Cathy Read Next today.  Below you can read a fabulous guest post from Jim all about his research for the book.

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The Great Darkness CoverAbout the Book

1939, Cambridge: The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout – The Great Darkness – covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the cool waters of the Cam.   The night is full of alarms but, in this Phoney War, the enemy never comes.

Daylight reveals a corpse on the riverside, the body torn apart by some unspeakable force. Brooke investigates, calling on the expertise and inspiration of a faithful group of fellow ‘nighthawks’ across the city, all condemned, like him, to a life lived away from the light. Within hours The Great Darkness has claimed a second victim.

War, it seems, has many victims, but what links these crimes of the night?

Format: ebook, hardcover (352 pp.)  Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 19th April 2018                   Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Crime

Purchase Links*
Publisher | Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Great Darkness on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘Researching The Great Darkness’ by Jim Kelly

Writing a novel set in a historical period is daunting. I always swore I would never do it. Ever. And in a strange way I’ve kept my promise, because The Great Darkness, set in the opening months of the Second World War in Cambridge, isn’t a historical novel in my mind. Let me explain.

Someone wise once said that history is what happened before your parents were born. If that definition stands the so-called test of time – which I think it does – then The Great Darkness is just a crime novel.

My father was a commando in the Second World War, my mum worked in the City of London during the blitz, my brother was born in the war. I came along twelve years after it ended in victory. So it’s just the world I was born into to, the big event I just missed, and heard talked about, for most of my early life. So when people ask how I prepared to write the book my first reaction is simple: “I didn’t prepare. It’s in my head already.”

But that’s not the whole truth. Writing about the past is like writing about anything else, you need detail, an insight into the ways things looked, smelt, tasted, and felt. It’s no good reading history books for this sort of detail.  Such books – and I have read many on the period because I love history – will give me the big facts; for example, that meat rationing began with bacon, butter and sugar on January 8, 1940. But what did sausages taste like?  Did butchers give more to their friends? Which shops had queues outside? How could you spot the Black Market? This kind of detail is much more difficult to find.

One good source is newspapers, especially local ones. I was very lucky because a historian in Cambridge has produced an online resource in which he summarised all the interesting stories in the Cambridge News for the whole war. These priceless abstracts give you the real minutiae of daily life. Another good way to ‘dig down’ into the past is diaries. Again, I was fortunate; I found an excellent war time diary by a conscientious objector called Jack Overton. He told me what it felt like to be in Cambridge when the air raid siren sounded, what the bombs falling sounded like when they struck.  This kind of background gives you a depth of information which feels like knowledge to the reader, not research. Any reader can tell the difference.

Lastly, my third major source was old photographs. These show you all the detail you’d never get in the printed word. A huge wall of sandbags outside the local police station, white lines on the curbs to help in the black out, the stained glass windows of a church removed to safety and replaced by boards. The central library in Cambridge has a first-class collection of such material, The Cambridgeshire Collection, and they produced boxes of pictures for me to see – and – another excellent resource – a map of the city in 1940.

There was a final twist in my preparation for writing the book. Someone – Napoleon I think – said that to understand a man (or a woman, I think we could add) you have to understand the world when he was twenty years of age. This is a good approach to building a character. What were the events which formed him – or her? My hero – Detective Inspector Eden Brooke – is about forty years old when the book starts. So he’d have been twenty in 1920 – so old enough to serve in the First World War.

Again, I knew a little, from books and films. But the great thing is to avoid cliché. So not the trenches, not the Western Front, but something unusual which I could research in a more traditional way. I think it is a good rule to narrow research down, and don’t try to understand too much. So I chose the desert war, which led me to Lawrence of Arabia, and the march from Cairo to Jerusalem.  A forgotten war then, but not now, because it was this campaign which led to the formation of the Middle East as we know it today. I read as much as I could, looked at photographs, and focused on a single event: the Second Battle of Gaza. It was here Eden Brooke’s story really began, because he was captured, and tortured, and this is the man we meet twenty years later.

The book’s out now and people have been very kind. I don’t mind readers spotting errors. I keep a list so that we can put them right when we get to later editions. So far there’s only two, which I am very proud are minor.  I have a Lancaster bomber flying overhead – but they didn’t fly until 1941. And I have a character saying, “Same old, same old” – apparently a phrase which came out of the Korean War.

If that’s the final tally, I’ll be very happy.                            © Jim Kelly

Jim KellyAbout the Author

Jim Kelly was born in 1957 and is the son of a Scotland Yard detective.  He went to university in Sheffield, later training as a journalist and worked on the Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and was education correspondent for the Financial Times.   His first book, The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature.  He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

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