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This mystery starts quickly with an intruder in the house, a frightened wife, Angela, and a brave husband, Homicide Detective Oliver "Tuck" Tucker. Leaving their black Lab, Hercule, to guard Angie, Tuck slips downstairs to investigate and is shot to death in the front hall. In a charming try at a difficult strategy, author T. J. O'Connor has Tuck trapped "here" rather than "there" but pretty much unnoticed by everyone. Dead or not, Tuck decides to find and punish his murderer.
Much of the early interest comes as Tuck discovers just how much he can't do – like open doors or move things around or even see well enough to read what he wrote in some of his own notes – and in his finding ways to get around his new shortcomings. A massive complication for him, for everyone in the novel, and for the reader is Tuck's jealousy when it comes to Angie and the focus of his anger is his former partner Bear Braddock who seems to be hanging around Angie way too much. Tuck is a highly trained detective – fifteen years on the force – but tends to come to conclusions quickly only to have to admit later that he was mistaken. A lovely perk that comes with being dead is that he can investigate nearly any situation that he can get into because he cannot in any way be in danger.
Angela is a professor of Anthropology at a nearby university and has been appointed to act as a sort of moderator between the warring factions of the local Historical Society which wants to preserve the site of some Civil War battles and a local developer who is trying to build the new highway he has been contracted to produce. Central to the arguments is a dig at Kelly's Orchard where bones and artifacts have been turned up by the earthmoving equipment bringing the construction to a standstill.
Add an elderly and mostly retired mobster to the Virginia countryside and the kinds of "helpers" he has at his command to see to his interests in the site and the tangle becomes a snarled mess.
This first in what appears to be a series of mysteries is hugely confusing, to a large extent because of the confusion of the protagonist who is overwhelmed by his change in mode of existence. But some of the confusion is the author's fault with interwoven threads of remote and obscure relationships among people that the reader doesn't get to know and whose names are therefore hard to keep straight. Introducing new characters and motivations late in the story seems to me to be something of a mistake or perhaps just an unfair tactic on the author's part.
This author, however, is to be encouraged to continue. The mystery is loads of fun to read. He would do well to do as much self-editing as possible and maybe slow down a bit when writing because the latter third of the book has errors that his publisher's editors did not catch. And one glaring "wrong" thing that is probably in no way T.J. O'Connor's fault is the book's cover. Ye gods! The entire book is set in Virginia and out the window of the cover scene are the kinds of tropical plants common in the Southwest United States – didn't anyone talk to the artist?
§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always has wanted to.
Reviewed by Diana Borse, January 2014
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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