Genre:
Mystery/Police Procedural
Description:
“In the
late nineties, a bad cop killed a good woman and DC Homicide
detective Marty Singer got to watch as the murderer walked out of the
courtroom a free man.
Twelve
years later, the victim's daughter comes to Marty begging for help:
the killer is stalking her now.
There's
just one problem: Marty's retired...and he's retired because he's
battling cancer. But with a second shot at the killer--and a first
chance at redemption--Marty's just found A
Reason to Live.”
Author:
“Matthew
Iden writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, thrillers, crime
fiction, and contemporary literary fiction with a psychological
twist.
An eclectic
resume--he's held jobs with the US Postal Service, international
non-profit groups, a short stint with the Forest Service in Sitka,
Alaska and time with the globe-spanning Semester at Sea program--has
given him inspiration for short stories and novel ideas, while trips
to Iceland, Patagonia, and Antarctica haven't hurt in the creative
juices department, either. A post-graduate education in English
Literature wasn't necessary, but it helped define what he didn't want
to do with his life and let him read a great deal of good books.”
For more,
visit the author’s website or his Facebook page.
Appraisal:
I’d
barely started reading A Reason to Believe when I hit this paragraph.
I was
killing time at a coffee shop, slouched in an overstuffed chair that
had been beaten into submission years earlier. The café—I don't
know the name, Middle Grounds or Mean Bean or something precious—was
a grungy, brown stain of a place flanked by a failing Cajun
restaurant on one side and a check-cashing store on the other. A
crowd of Hispanic guys hung around out front looking simultaneously
aimless and expectant, hoping their next job was about to pull up to
the curb. I looked up from my cup and stared at the girl who'd called
me by name. She was slim, with delicate brown hair worn past the
shoulders and intense, dark eyes set in a face so pale Poe would've
written stories about it.
I was
impressed. In a single evocative paragraph I understood the coffee
shop, the neighborhood it was in, the crowd outside (which figures
into a later scene), a lot about the narrator Marty, and not only
pictured the girl who’d approached him, but was curious about what
she wanted. I was hooked. And I stayed hooked.
The
premise, that a murderer who escaped punishment has returned and is
stalking the original victim’s daughter, is a good one that gives
the protagonist, Marty, a chance at some kind of redemption. That
Marty is retired because he has cancer complicates things in a couple
of ways. First, although this is much like a police procedural,
technically Marty isn’t even a cop anymore, so he doesn’t have
ready access to the resources he had in the past. Then his
chemotherapy treatment interferes with his ability to do much of
anything some days, so detecting is out of the question.
This is the
first of a series with at least three more books already available.
I’m not sure if that means chemo goes well, but I’m eager to find
out what his next case turns out to be.
FYI:
Adult
language.
Added
for Reprise Review: A
Reason to Live was a nominee
in the Mystery category for B&P 2014 Readers' Choice Awards.
Original review ran January 17, 2014
Format/Typo
Issues:
No
significant issues.
Rating:
***** Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 85-90,000 words
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