|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
It begins with the apparent suicide of a man dying of cancer whose latest business venture has just gone belly up. It revolves around the regimental flag of the Virginia 28th, captured by the First Minnesota Volunteers at Gettysburg in the Civil War. It engages a pair of intelligent Minneapolis homicide investigators, Marshall Bahr and Nettie Frisch from an investigative team called the First Response Unit. A young patrol cop is first on the scene of the hanging. It looks like Frank Beck has taken his own life after his latest and biggest business collapse. The bureaucracy writes off the incident as what it looks like, a tragic suicide. But the young cop has a few questions and he contacts Bahr with his concerns. In this somewhat unusual way, a new case attracts the detective's attention. This novel, second in KJ Erickson's developing series about the Minneapolis cops, is a definite winner. Erickson is certainly a good writer, she proved that in her debut novel, "Third Person Singular." But her style and her talent shine even more brightly in this police procedural. One of the difficulties of this kind of novel is the need to infuse what is essentially detailed investigative work with something else that engages the reader's interest well enough to stay with the story. Some writers do it with large dollops of action that is often only tangential to the main story. Others do it with convoluted sub-plots and extensive characterizations which frequently obscure the main plot. Erickson not only includes judicious amounts of character development and interaction giving us useful insight into the main characters, but she blends characterizations with gradually intensifying tension and attention to detail that keeps the reader in the room with the increasingly frustrated detectives, as answers to pressing questions remain elusive. Bahr and Frisch soon know they are close to answers, but still lack a few crucial pieces of information. A clever combination of time pressure, politics, and personal attitudes show a maturity and sophistication often lacking in books from much more experienced writers. As the book progresses Erickson never loses control of the narrative. Her pacing is excellent and the shifting scenes contrive to show Detective Bar's ability to adapt to different situations. Bahr grows as a character, even as his creator grows as an author. Erickson is like a lot of writers. She is interested in telling stories; something she's been good at since childhood. "It was a great help as a teenaged babysitter," she says. "I could get the kids to bed early if I agreed to tell them a story I made up on the spot. Writing has always been an important tool in my professional life, regardless of the job I was doing." She decided to try her hand at writing fiction when she acquired a home computer. "I'm not good at repetitive tasks and I don't have the patience to do the editing and revising by hand which is necessary to produce a polished manuscript. The computer changed that. I still have to force myself to re-read and edit but the mechanics are so much easier." Erickson says she had a hard time for a while after September 11. "I don't know if it's because I'm writing commercial crime fiction, but my guess is that whatever I was doing would have seem pretty small potatoes after that. People sometimes ask how I feel writing murder as entertainment. You know, I'm writing what all fiction writers write, stories about the human condition, about people. Death, even violent death, is a part of the human experience." Erickson says she was able to quit a her position with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2000. "I had a good job I liked with an organization I think a lot of, but for me, change is good. My long-time personal goal was to take a year off. So I did. Two weeks after I quit my day job, I signed a contact with St. Martin's Press for two books and I've been writing full-time ever since. Of course, it remains to be seen whether writing novels will produce enough income to continue." "What I write is called commercial fiction. My principal goal is to entertain. To tell a good story. Especially in writing crime fiction, I'm telling a story that is outside the range of typical human experience. At least it's outside what people hope will be their experience. If my books provide deeper insight into the human condition, that's fine, but my goal is to entertain readers." Erickson's daily routine is not unusual. Mornings she tends to the dog and has breakfast. Then she reads three newspapers. After that she writes for several hours. Her writing routine is to get the flow going and keep it going. When Erickson runs across something that requires fact checking or additional research, she highlights it and keeps on going. That helps her to avoid interrupting the creative drive. She's just completed a draft of her third novel. "The newspapers I read provoked the idea for "The Dead Survivors." The Pioneer Press did a series on the controversy between Minnesota and Virginia over ownership of the flag and there was a piece in the Washington Post as well. With that I had the basic plot in mind."
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, May 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 ]
| 
