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 Live 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 by Matthew Iden 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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