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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | MYSTERY GOR | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
As Black River Falls, Iowa, prepares for a presidential election campaign visit from Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, Reverend John Muldaur is stirring up the town with both his anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic circulars and his snake-handling ceremonies. When Muldaur drops dead on his altar, however, it's not from a snakebite but from strychnine-laced Pepsi. With only a week before her good friend Tricky Dick comes to town, Judge Esme Whitney enlists her friend the struggling lawyer and occasional investigator Sam McCain to prevent the population of Black River Falls from looking like "a bunch of hillbillies." Once again, McCain must confront local prejudices, secrets, and dim-witted police chief Cliffe Sykes, Jr. to solve another small-town mystery in the acclaimed series launched with The Day the Music Died. Author Ed Gorman is the winner of many awards, including the Shamus, the Spur, and the International Fiction Writer's Award. "... .provoke[s] a bracing nostalgia for a timethat was neither as innocent nor as dull as is sometimes said."-Wall Street Journal "Without overworking those warhorses, nostalgia and kitsch, he sharply evokes the twilight of the '50s... ."-Los Angeles Times "No writer captures the mood of 50s middle America ... better than Gorman."-Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine "Gorman ... seems to have hit a mother lode with this series."-Publishers Weekly " ... .good and evil clash ... as they have in the more urban crime drama of Block or Leonard."-Booklist
Author Notes
Edward Joseph Gorman was born on November 2, 1941 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He attended Coe College, but didn't graduate. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked for 23 years in advertising, public relations, and politics. His first novel, Rough Cut, was published in 1984. In 1985, he founded Mystery Scene Magazine and was the executive editor until 2002.
He wrote crime fiction, horror fiction, and western fiction under his own name and several pseudonyms. Using the pseudonym Daniel Ransom, he wrote horror and science fiction books including Daddy's Little Girl, The Babysitter, Nightmare Child, The Fugitive Stars, and Zone Soldiers. Using the pseudonym Richard Driscoll, he and Kevin D. Randle co-wrote the Star Precinct trilogy. Under his own name, he wrote crime and mystery books including Wolf Moon, The First Lady, the Sam McCain Mystery series, the Robert Payne Mystery series, the Jack Dwyer Mystery series, and the Dev Conrad Mystery series. His novel The Poker Club was adapted into a movie in 2008. He also wrote The First Lady and Senatorial Privilege under the pseudonym E. J. Gorman. He edited many volumes of science fiction, horror, and crime.
He received numerous awards including a Spur Award for Best Short Fiction for The Face in 1992, the Anthony Award for Best Critical Work for The Fine Art of Murder in 1994, and an International Horror Guild Award for Cages in 1995. He also received the Shamus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the International Fiction Writers Award, and The Eye, the lifetime achievement award given out by the Private Eye Writers of America. He died after a long battle with cancer on October 14, 2016 at the age of 74.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shamus-winner Gorman's fourth nostalgia-ridden Sam McCain novel (after The Day the Music Died), set in Black River Falls, Iowa (pop. 27,300), during the summer of 1960, has to rank as one of the more good-natured mysteries in memory. His wouldn't-hurt-a-fly but much abused hero, a part-time lawyer and part-time PI, gets hired by the town judge to investigate the murder of John Muldaur, a local fundamentalist preacher who used live rattlesnakes to test the "purity" of his flock, after someone doses the preacher's bottle of Pepsi with strychnine. When he wasn't sleeping with the wife of one of his congregation, Muldaur was conducting a vigorous campaign to expose the conspiracy of Zionists and Roman Catholics to take over the world. Gorman has a lot of fun at the expense of his half-witted bigots. McCain's orders are to find Muldaur's killer before the arrival of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who's on a campaign tour and due to deliver a speech in Black River Falls. A stupid sheriff and the fanatical hillbillies who revere Muldaur's name don't make McCain's task any easier. Gorman delivers an intelligent and plausible solution to the crime, while the killer proves to be an unexpected but logical choice good for a goose bump or two. If the book's a bit thin on substance, it's a fast read with the best cast of comical country characters this side of Dogpatch. (Feb. 1) FYI: Gorman is the editor of Mystery Scene magazine. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The nation is trembling on the brink of the '60s, but life goes on as usual in Gorman's Iowa. Though beauteous Pamela Forrest, Sam McCain's hopeless inamorata, has fled to Kansas City with her married swain, Sam's found an equally unsuitable new woman to love: Black River Falls Clarion reporter Kylie Burke, whose irresponsible husband's straying doesn't seem to justify her own. Meantime, Richard Nixon's upcoming campaign stop at Cedar Rapids has the townsfolk gently polarized along predictable lines. But one group's anti-Kennedy fervor isn't so gentle. Rev. John Muldaur, an itinerant preacher who'd rather handle snakes than papists, is convinced that the Jews stockpiling weapons beneath Catholic churches are behind Kennedy's campaign, and that one of the hundreds of enemies his zealotry has earned him wants him dead. Can Sam find out who? Extending his record as the world's worst bodyguard (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, 2001, etc.), Sam visits one of Muldaur's garage services just in time to see his would-be client keel over dead of strychnine poisoning. When the more orthodox Rev. Thomas C. Courtney becomes a second murder victim, Sam has to wonder whether somebody's targeted the county's clergy-and whether he can really trust idiot police chief Cliffie Sykes to do the right thing when there are so many tempting false targets for his dread power. Once more, the affectionate period detail bears out both halves of Sam's observation that "everything was just okey-dokey here in the land of Lincoln. But we knew better, didn't we?"
Booklist Review
Richard Nixon is running for president, and one of his campaign stops will be Black River Falls, Iowa. The only reason the visit is of any concern at all to young attorney Sam McCain--whose personal politics register considerably to the left of the vice president's--is that the county's leading Republican is Judge Esme Ann Whitney, who is also Sam's boss and sole source of income in his part-time capacity as an investigator. When John Muldaur, a snake-handling preacher dies of poisoning, Judge Whitney directs Sam to investigate, determined that the case be solved by the time Nixon and the national media hit town. When another local preacher is also murdered, Sam's hopes of a quick resolution dissipate. The fourth McCain mystery is another dead-on perfect journey to the underside of the late '50s and early '60s, exposing the anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism that lurked beneath the era's placid surface. Another strong entry in a thoroughly enjoyable series. --Wes Lukowsky
