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Summary
Summary
Loomiss crime debut showcases a fantastic mix of nail-biting suspense and sharp, dry wit in this insiders look at life--and death--on Cape Cod.
Author Notes
Jon Loomis is the author of two collections of poetry, Vanitas Motel, which won the 1997 FIELD Poetry Prize, and The Pleasure Principle . Twice a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Loomis has also been awarded the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin, and has been the recipient of grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. He lives with his wife and son in west-central Wisconsin. High Season is his first novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet Loomis (Vanitas Motel) makes an auspicious fiction debut with this mystery starring an aging Baltimore cop who becomes sheriff of his native Provincetown, Mass. Frank Coffin has to deal with a new boss intent on running the tourist town with an iron fist, a younger girlfriend uninterested in marriage but intent on having a child, a car that's about to fall apart and memories of a multiple murder so horrific it drove him from his old job. Then, the strangled body of a vacationing TV evangelist, clad in an unflattering dress, turns up on the beach. Though the state police take over the case, various town worthies, including his boss, pressure Coffin into tracking developments. When he does, he discovers a powerful group has designs on the community and is willing to do anything to bring its plans to completion. Full of entertaining twists and sly observations, this is a perfect book for late summer reading. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Loomis' debut novel, starring Frank Coffin, the only somewhat-willing sheriff of the resort town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, displays the sureness of pace, dead-on atmosphere, and effortless wit of a veteran pro like Robert B. Parker. Coffin fits into the Melville tradition of someone trying and failing to escape the pull of the sea and of fate: the Coffin family jinx goes back through generations of whaling accidents and extends to Coffin's brother, killed on a Swift boat in Vietnam. Inevitably, Coffin, after being landlocked as a Baltimore cop for nine years, is pulled back to the Cape and to an inner circle of hell, a tiny office in the town hall basement, right next to the boiler room. Coffin's dream of coasting by on tiny, tourist-time infractions is burst when a TV evangelist, of virulently antigay persuasion, is found strangled on a gay beach, dressed in drag. Coffin's investigation puts him and his girlfriend in ever-escalating peril. So many things are rendered perfectly in this novel: the depiction of police politics (Coffin was moved from a harbor-view office to the basement when his uncle, former chief of police, was ousted after bribery and extortion charges); the love-hate tensions of a Cape Cod tourist town; the sharp but not artificially bright dialogue; and Coffin's own rueful self-reflections. Very funny and very tense. A great read.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
One thing must be said for Patricia Cornwell: she's got guts. And not just in the crime lab where her protagonist cuts up the cadavers of murder victims. In BOOK OF THE DEAD (Putnam, $26.95), her 15th novel to feature the brilliant and abrasive forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell overhauls key elements of this successful series to take account of both the scientific advances made since 1990, when "Postmortem" was published, and the competition from others who have entered her once esoteric field. Cornwell has noted that "the interior world of forensic science and medicine was a dark and chilly secret" when she wrote her first book, based on her experiences in the office of Virginia's chief medical examiner. Back then, it made sense for a crack pathologist like Scarpetta to plug away alone in the lab and conduct her fieldwork in the company of a blunt homicide cop like Pete Marino. Nowadays, though, a public educated by "C.S.I." expects sexy scientists working in sleek crime labs with cool equipment. Cornwell begins her upgrade on a case that starts in Rome, where a 16-year-old American tennis star is murdered by a psychopath with a macabre style of postmortem mutilation. But the plot doesn't really take hold until it shifts to Charleston, S.C., where Scarpetta has opened a private practice. Once she and her computer-genius niece have the lab fully up and running, the facilities should knock your eye out. Meanwhile, Scarpetta's grand ambitions are projected by her use of "the largest scanning electron microscope on the planet" to analyze the grains of sand the killer leaves in his victims' bodies. But enhancing Scarpetta's scientific status is only one part of Cornwell's remodeling job; she also sets her sights on characters who don't carry the weight they once did. Marino, for one, really feels the pinch. ("I didn't use to be like this," he says, after a particularly appalling blunder.) She might consider that Benton Wesley, stuffy when he was an F.B.I, profiler and even stuffier now that he's on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, also has the whiff of redundancy. And then there's Dr. Marilyn Self, "the most famous psychiatrist in the world," so jealous of Scarpetta she keeps shoving her way into cases that would be better off without her. In trying to reassert Scarpetta's supremacy, Cornwell hasn't exactly purged the series of tired formulas and worn-out cast members. But she has shaken things up a bit and produced one terrific new character, a bodyguard named Bull who's helping Scarpetta tend her neglected garden. It will be interesting to see what grows there. When it comes to paranormal mysteries, the really silly stuff about vampire sleuths and psychic cops can be found all over TV. But grafting supernatural elements onto straightforward detective stories is also a trend in genre fiction, and THE KINGDOM OF BONES (Shaye Areheart/Crown, $24.95), by Stephen Gallagher, shows the occult mystery in its best light. Vividly set in England and America during the booming industrial era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this stylish thriller conjures a perfect demon to symbolize the age and its appetites, an entity that inhabits characters eager to barter their souls for fame and fortune. When met, this demon is residing in Edmund Whitlock, an actor whose life gives us entry into the colorful world of traveling theatricals. When Whitlock passes on his curse to the company soubrette, the troupe manager follows her to America, intent on rescuing her, and runs afoul of the law. Although Gallagher delivers horror with a grand melodramatic flourish, his storytelling skills are more subtly displayed in scenes of the provincial theaters, gentlemen's sporting clubs and amusement parks where a now-vanished society once took its rough pleasures. As a first novel with an easygoing sleuth and a not-too-tough mystery to solve, Jon Loomis's HIGH SEASON (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) is the kind of book that can be overshadowed by its heavyweight competitors. And that would be an undeserved fate for this entertaining whodunit set in Provincetown, Mass., which warmly captures the free and funky spirit of that famously tolerant beach community. Frank Coffin, its first and only police detective, thinks he can handle the case of a married televangelist who turns up dead at a gay men's beach in a flowered muumuu. But can he deal with all the nosy and bossy characters who push their way into the investigation? Although the body count runs too high for serious credibility, Loomis drenches the narrative with so much local color that the reader comes away feeling like a native. Every violent death in a Henning Mankell police procedural incites deep rumination by his Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, about the moral corruption that breeds crime. The violent death in KENNEDY'S BRAIN (New Press, $26.95), a novel from which Wallander is absent, also sets off troubled thinking on the part of Louise Cantor, an archaeologist who returns from a dig in Greece to find her son dead in his flat. Rejecting the police's conclusion that he committed suicide, she travels to Spain, Australia and Mozambique in search of answers to her questions about her son and the issues, like the AIDS epidemic in Africa, that mattered to him. All this is conveyed with grave solemnity in Laurie Thompson's translation, but because Louise lacks Wallander's milder voice and keener sensibility, her moral outrage becomes too shrill. The world of forensic science was 'a dark and chilly secret' when Patricia Cornwell wrote her first novel.
Kirkus Review
Multiple murders rock peaceful Provincetown. Sheriff Frank Coffin lands a sensitive missing person's case when Melinda Merkin asks him to investigate the apparent disappearance of her husband, the Reverend Ron Merkin. A charismatic leader in the fight against gay rights, strapping Ron is a hardcore cross-dresser, a fact Melinda would like to keep under wraps. Before long, his body is found, clad in a floral muumuu and strangled by his raspberry-colored scarf. Facing Provincetown's first murder in six years, Coffin questions his decision to relocate from the Baltimore Police Department to this gay mecca and tourist magnet. Much of this series kickoff is devoted to fleshing out Coffin's supporting cast: longtime girlfriend Jamie, who issues a sudden ultimatum for a baby; reliable deputy Lola, a lovelorn lesbian who's Coffin's closest confidante; Coffin's mother, suffering from Alzheimer's in a nursing home; and a volatile old painter named Kotowski. Undercover efforts by Coffin's deputies in drag yield humor but few leads. The identity of a second victim, a local high roller named Sonny Duarte up to his neck in shady deals, shifts suspicion away from the grieving widow but onto Kotowski, whose house has been seized by local developers. The death toll grows before Coffin deduces the identity of the ruthless killer. Loomis (The Pleasure Principle, 2001, etc.) writes with warmth and wisdom, auguring well for further Coffin adventures. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Eight years ago, Frank Coffin, a burned-out Baltimore homicide cop, returned home to the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown, MA. The headaches start with the murder of a vacationing, dress-wearing TV evangelist. The state police claim the case as theirs, but the mayor orders Coffin to conduct a quiet investigation that could get him in serious trouble. Either way, the elusive murderer is still in town. Written with humor and pathos and incorporating small-town philosophy, this is a terrific mystery debut. Fans of Chris Grabenstein's Jersey Shore mysteries (Tilt-a-Whirl; Whack a Mole) may enjoy. Loomis lives in Wisconsin. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Frank Coffin's office was windowless and cramped, hidden away in the darkest corner of the Town Hall basement, next to the boiler room. A fat sewage pipe ran the width of the ceiling; now and then a drop or two of ominous fluid plunked onto whatever paperwork lay strewn across Coffin's desktop: condensation, he hoped. In the old days, when his uncle Rudy was chief of police, Coffin's office had been on the third floor. Small but sunlit, the upstairs office had high ceilings and two tall windows that looked out on the harbor. Then Rudy was forced to resign amid allegations of bribery and extortion, and when the new chief, Preston Boyle, arrived in May, his first official act had been to move Coffin into the basement. Nothing personal, Boyle had said. Coffin had been a cop for a long time: fourteen years in the Baltimore City Police Department--including nine in the homicide division--and eight years as Provincetown's first and only police detective. He knew what was personal. Losing the upstairs office amounted to a demotion. Coffin's intercom buzzed. It was Jeff Skillings, the day's desk officer. "Lady to see you, Frank. Says her husband's missing." Melinda Merkin was a small woman with an unusually large head. She wore a lime green pantsuit. A diamond of at least two carats sparked on her left hand. Her hair was brown with frosted highlights and wispy bangs--a style, Coffin thought, directly out of the early eighties. She wore black sunglasses, which she took off as soon as she sat down. Her eyes were dark and tired and bulged like a terrier's. Her eyebrows appeared to have been painted on. Skillings handed Coffin a manila folder as he showed her in. "Good gravy, what a mess," she said, when Skillings was gone. She dabbed at her eyes and nose with a shredded Kleenex. "If this gets in the papers, it'll just be the end of us." "What do you mean, the end of us?" Coffin said. He wrote the word Merkin on the manila folder, then circled it. He looked inside. It contained a photograph of a man dressed in a blue suit, a small gold cross pinned to one lapel. A banner hung against a wall in the background. It read 1999 bible baptist conv----. The rest of the word was out of the frame. "My husband is Ron Merkin," the woman said. "The Reverend Ron Merkin. We're on TV in thirty-seven states. If this gets out, the show's over, Rover." Coffin leaned back in his chair. He'd seen Reverend Ron on TV once or twice while channel-surfing; he remembered a sweaty, angry man with white froth in the corners of his mouth. Merkin had built a large national following by showing up at gay bars, pride rallies, even the funerals of AIDS victims, followers in tow, chanting antigay slogans and brandishing crudely lettered signs that read like fourth-grade hate mail. Coffin suddenly felt angry and a little claustrophobic, trapped in his office with this odd woman and her accompanying cloud of perfume: lily of the valley, maybe; something floral and heavy. "Reverend Ron," he said, tapping his pencil on the desk. "He's the God Hates Fags guy, right?" "Lord, no--Ronnie's thing is God Hates Homos. God Hates Fags belongs to someone else--it's trademarked. We'd be drowning in deep doo-doo if we tried to use that." Coffin opened the folder, took out the photo, and placed it on his desk. "So, if you don't mind my asking," Coffin said, "what's your business in Provincetown? Performing a little missionary work among the heathen?" "Look, Detective--" She stopped, hesitated for a moment. "I collect ceramic figurines." Coffin tried to interrupt, but she held up a shushing finger. "Dog figurines, Detective. Mostly porcelain and china. Every shape and size, every breed, from every country and period you can think of. I've been collecting them for thirty years. Everywhere you look in my house, you're looking at dog figurines. I mean, I've got thousands, literally. I couldn't stop collecting now if I tried, and even if I could stop collecting them, I wouldn't want to, you know what I mean?" She held up the finger again. "My husband, bless his heart, does not understand my thing for dog figurines. I'm sure there are moments when he wishes every surface in his house did not have a half-dozen china pooches sitting on it. I'm sure, Detective, that there are times when that poor man is sick to death of the whole shooting match. But does he criticize? Does he complain? Not very blessed much, I'm here to tell you. We all have our stuff, Detective. I've got mine, he's got his; dollars to doughnuts you've got yours." She opened her bag, extracted a second photograph, and placed it on the desk in front of Coffin. It showed the same beefy man, standing in what looked like a motel room. He wore beige pumps--big ones--and a calf-length navy blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar. Coffin couldn't suppress a sharp bark of laughter. He looked up at Mrs. Merkin. "Sorry," he said. "That was taken last winter," she said. "Key West." Coffin looked at the picture again. The big man seemed to be trying to straighten his wig, which was greenish-blond and looked as rumpled and forlorn as road kill. Drag queens he could understand, sort of; there was something tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, all that glitter and flash, a kind of burlesque-on/homage-to the whole idea of glamour in all its blowzy, tittering goofiness. The straight cross-dressers were harder to figure out--the just plain transvestites everyone in town called tall ships. The tall ships tended to be large men who strode up and down Commercial Street in plus-sized tweed skirts, support hose, and pumpkin-colored lipstick; craggy-faced and lonely-looking men with dispirited wigs and five o'clock shadows poking through pancake makeup. Sometimes they had their wives, even their kids in tow. They reminded Coffin of his Aunt Connie after she'd been through several rounds of chemotherapy. "So, can you tell me what happened last night?" Coffin asked. She nodded. "He got all fixed up and said he was going out to walk around, don't wait up. That was around ten o'clock. I woke up a few times in the night, expecting him to be there, but he wasn't." "He got dressed up and went out to walk around by himself?" "As far as I know, yes." "Was that unusual?" Melinda Merkin smiled a little with the left side of her mouth. "Well, not for Ronnie. He likes to be seen, without people knowing who he is. He likes that a lot." "Does your husband drink?" Coffin asked. "He gave it up years ago. God told him to." "Any drug use that you know of?" "No. He's never messed with any of that stuff." Coffin hesitated. "Does your husband have affairs? One-night stands?" Melinda Merkin furrowed her painted brows; deciding how much of the truth to tell, Coffin guessed. "I guess a lot of men struggle with the lust thing at some point in their lives," she said, "but Ronnie's mellowed out in the last few years. He wasn't exactly Casanova to begin with." Coffin placed the two photos side by side and looked at them closely. "Does your husband sleep with men, Mrs. Merkin?" "No! Good Lord. Just because a man likes to wear a dress every now and then doesn't make him queer." Coffin raised his eyebrows. "Did you two have an argument or anything last night, before he . . . ?" She dabbed at her eyes again; the Kleenex was smeared with mascara. "I am too daggone tired out by all this business to fight about much of anything anymore, Detective. I'm not exactly jumping for joy, but I'm doing my best to deal with it, because I love my husband." Coffin slid the photos into the manila folder, along with his notes. "Mrs. Merkin," he said, "odds are your husband will turn up in the next few days. We get one or two cases like this every year--it's easy for out-of-towners to get swept up in things around here--but we haven't permanently lost a husband yet." Mrs. Merkin looked him straight in the eye. "He's a good man, you know. He takes good care of me and our children. He's not some pervert--he's a good, steady, God-fearing man, except for this one thing." "Yes, ma'am," Coffin said. "No one's suggesting otherwise." He waited a beat. "We'll ask around as discreetly as we can. He'll turn up." "Can I have my picture back? The one in the dress?" "Maybe we'd better hold on to it for now, if this is how he's likely to appear. We'll keep it safe." Mrs. Merkin sighed. "It's his sisters' fault," she said. "They used to dress him up like Tinker Bell when he was little." Later, briefing the night shift in the cramped squad room, Coffin handed out color Xeroxes of both photos of Ron Merkin. Jeff Skillings, Lola Winters, and Coffin's cousin Tony were full-time, year-round officers; four part-time summer cops were also present. Everyone chuckled at the picture of the big man in the blue dress. "What's that on his head?" Tony said. "I think it's a marmot," said one of the summer cops. "Please keep an eye out for this gentleman," Coffin said. "His name is Ron Merkin. He didn't come home last night, and his wife would like him back." Skillings was grinning. "Ron Merkin?" he said. "Not the Reverend Ron Merkin?" "That's right," Coffin said. "Do not discuss Mr. Merkin's appearance in this photo with anyone outside the department, especially the news media. No matter how tempting it might be." Then Chief Boyle took over the meeting. He was small and red-faced and wore his hair combed over a speckled bald spot. Four months ago, Boyle had been deputy police chief in Ashtabula, Ohio. He was, according to the Ashtabula PD, an excellent administrator, scrupulously honest, a man who believed in doing things under budget and by the book. In a press release, Provincetown's Board of Selectmen had described him as "the perfect candidate." He was the exact opposite of Coffin's uncle Rudy. "For the past several years," he began, eyebrows bristling, "the PPD has turned a blind eye to drug use and public indecency among the gay community." This was essentially true, Coffin knew. Police did not patrol the gay clubs hoping to bust ecstasy dealers, nor did they harass the men who frequented the darker shadows of the town beach at night. Coffin's uncle Rudy had believed that there was no percentage in pissing off the gay community, a stand with which the selectpersons, most of whom were merchants or bar owners or guest-house proprietors or owners of significant real estate or otherwise invested in the town's economic health, wholeheartedly agreed. "Starting tonight," Boyle continued, "that's going to change. Tonight, at 0230 hours, we will conduct a raid on Havemeyer's Wharf." Coffin groaned. His cousin Tony turned to one of the summer cops. "The dick dock," he whispered loudly. Boyle held up a warning forefinger. "Residents have complained. The situation has gotten out of control. I was hired to keep the peace and ensure public safety, and that's what I intend to do." The dick dock poked into the harbor like a crooked finger, warted along its length with rickety cottages. It was one of Provincetown's busiest late-night trysting places; during the peak summer months, on warm nights, dozens of gay men gathered on the beach beneath the spindly pier, where many indulged in anonymous sex, paired off or in groups. Even a year or two ago, Coffin could not have imagined the residents of those cottages objecting; in the "old" days, people had rented there precisely because they wanted to be part of the scene. Now that the Havemeyer cottages had all been condoized and were selling for ten times Coffin's annual salary, the new, wealthy residents were apparently not amused by the dick dock's nocturnal mating ritual. Boyle waved a handful of plastic handcuffs. "Everyone make sure you've got plenty of twisties. Make sure you wear gloves. Watch out for needles, in the sand and in pockets. And be aware that drug possession counts on this one: If they're holding, they're busted." Coffin raised his hand. "What is it, Coffin?" "Tomorrow's women-only hot tub night at the Spinnaker Inn," he said. "Are we planning to raid them, too?" Boyle's brows bristled and twitched. "We're talking about public indecency, Coffin," he said. "Lewd conduct. You can't just go down to the beach and do the funky monkey anytime you want. No particular group of people in this town is above the law. No matter what your uncle the shakedown artist thought." "Good for us, sir," said Jeff Skillings, face completely deadpan. Skillings had been on the force for fifteen years and had lived openly with his partner, Mark, a manager at Fishermen's Bank, for five. "What's that, Skillings?" Boyle said. "Stamping out indecency and all, sir--it's about time." One of the summer cops squirmed in his seat. "Uh, Chief?" he said, raising his hand. "What is it, Pinsky?" "What's the policy on using force--like, if somebody resists arrest? Just nightsticks? Or can we take the tasers along, just in case?" "Too bad we don't have bullwhips," Skillings said, still straight-faced. The summer cops nodded. Coffin laughed. "You got something else to say, Coffin?" "Just laughing, Chief," Coffin said. "Well, stop it." Coffin's shift was over; when he got home, he would make a couple of calls. News of the impending raid would travel fast. Copyright (c) 2007 by Jon Loomis. All rights reserved. Excerpted from High Season by Jon Loomis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.