Dead for the Money by Peg Herring

Dead for the Money – A Dead Detective Mystery (Book Two) by Peg Herring

ISBN: 9780957152700

For Kindle ASIN: B007RSLPC0

LL-Publications 2012

231 pages

The premise in this detective novel continues from that original concept in the first: a few people, who had died and on a kind of idyllic cruise ship in limbo, can ask for a mystery surrounding their demise to be investigated. Seamus is the clever one who, although dead, goes back to the living, his spirit jumping from living body to body in order to hear and see what they do and put the clues together. Like in the first novel, Seamus, unwillingly, takes a female partner. Mildred is keen to demonstrate her investigative prowess and although she is naïve and makes blunders, Seamus is impressed at her observational skills he lacks. For example when they interview the deceased Dunbar, she spots he persistently tilts his head to one side indicating that in his living existence he was partially deaf even though now in limbo no one has an affliction.

Think Ellery Queen meets Casper, except that the friendly ghosts here are invisible and silent – for the most part. So when a man falls over a cliff edge, the obvious suspect has to be exonerated.

There are beautiful descriptive phrases thought and uttered in a way only possible by the dead in this unusual novel. Consider this as Mildred looks at the ocean over the limbo cruise ship’s rail. ‘…colours beyond what had been seen, sounds unlike any other, scents and feelings that were stimulating and calming at once, and even a taste in the air… a person’s favourite but better.’ Sensory overload, but better.

Something else we can’t have in terrestrial detective novels is the way Seamus, inside the head of a witness, finds his own moods altering in response to that of the host. For example when he is in the teenager, Brodie, he finds himself being moody and irritable; when he jumps to the policeman, Rainer, he becomes negative; then he leaps into Scarlett and at once picks up on her vivacity. Actually, Peg Herring calls her attitude ‘spirited’. I asked my wife if she thought that a pun or completely unintentional. She opted for a pun. (she’d read the book in between her university science work. She likes detective stories but can’t stand science fiction, nor unscientific fantasy tales – such as I write. In spite of her literary prejudices, she enjoyed Dead for the Money, and that speaks volumes for its entertainment value.)

There’s living human emotions and observations in this book too. A line I appreciated is where a widow, Callie, needed to switch men as, in turn they got wise of being used as an ATM.

Returning to the prose, Herring has a knack for evocative phrasing and she, like me, prefers to use real geographical places for her real world. Mackinac Island has an olde-worlde charm on the USA-Canadian border. ‘Brodie… pictured moonlit walks along the road that circled the island, the scent of lilacs, the sound of ferry horns, a trip to Arch Rock or a carriage ride through the tiny, crowded town.’

Partly because of those phrases, and the mystery-solving, Peg Herring’s Dead Detective novels are reminiscent of Joyce C Oates books, such as The Falls, which is also set on the Canadian – USA border and that one also starts with a fall. In this novel there is promise of a fall at the end too as a young woman, being chased, climbs a narrow cable up a suspension bridge. More suspense than is good for readers of a delicate constitution – be warned!

Anyone who loves detective mysteries and wonders what it might be like to be dead but not yet passed on, will find Dead for the Money an escapade they cannot put down.

Available from LL-Publications as an ebook and paperback. Click here.

Reviewing from Lanzarote

Shall we take the laptop? Yes, no, maybe for a couple of hours before wife, who would have used it to craft more of her non-fiction Masters work on Education while I would have snatched in between to write up book reviews, more of ARIA book three, and complaints letters. Why on the sunny side of Earth should I want to write a moaning missive? Lanzarote is a fascinating lump of mostly cooled lava in the Canary Islands, but the resort we’d swapped our 5-star Villacana, Spanish timeshare for, with Lanz and Club in its name shouldn’t rate a star, or a moon. Yes, under new ownership and so refurbishments are in hand, and all we need to do is wait for the next meteor. In spite of the shabby furnishings, and corny entertainment, it was clean, the maid smiled and the weather was sufficiently cloudy to stop us getting sunburnt.

My Mold barber told me to hire a bike in Costa Teguise and ‘do’ the coastal bike route. I was tempted but there were too many kids, dogs, people and the occasional lizard to be a whizzing carefree ride. We walked our sandals to the bone instead. And when our feet complained we read books. One of my book group novels is Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. ‘Author’s preferred text’ ie not the one hacked around by the BBC for the TV version in the 1990s. I’ve met Neil at a convention. He’s tall with dark curly hair and no, he won’t remember me. Neverwhere is a beautiful novel set in the underground tubes, cellars, basements, sewers and sometimes roofs of London. I keep thinking it should be called Underwhere. Beyond the prologue, the story starts with a young female, Doors, who has a marvellous ability to think open doors, catches, locks and hearts. She is being chased by two gruesome killers… but I’m not reviewing it now. China Mieville’s Kraken is also set in London – both terrific writers, Kraken more for adults, I’d say. I also read M. John Harrison’s The Centauri Device, because I am an admirer of his literary style and mistakenly assumed the book was about a marvellous technology – the next topic for the Chester Library SFF group. I quite enjoyed the story, based on a sentient bomb that can only be triggered by someone with Centauri genes. The lone man with such, John Truck, leads a fraught existence chasing his dreams in a kind of shoot ‘em up Star Wars feel story (but without aliens, unless that’s Truck). I liken it to those other SF stories where a lone captain struggles to survive against all odds: Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem, Horza in Ian M Banks’ Consider Phlebus.

I read with LOL moments, Mark Jackman’s Acracknophobia, third and last (apparently by popular request) in the series on Sid Tillsley, vampire slayer with a mighty fist. Full review in a later blog. Also Peg Herring’s Dead for the Money – the second in the Dead Detective Agency series – a clever premise of a demised detective going from limbo back to the living to solve a murder. My wife, who doesn’t enjoy fantasies, but does like mysteries, liked this novel a lot.

I also started, cos I found it by lucky chance in the resort library, Ian M Bank’s Surface Detail (2010) in the Culture Series.  Hang on, it starts with a girl being chased by two killers…

There’s more to Lanzarote than me reading books for review. I’ve been three times and cannot stop admiring how early settlers, drifting, possibly expecting lack of survival, found water and made it work. The Canaries exist because of the tectonic plates pushing up in mid-Atlantic. 300 former volcanoes make up the island of Lanzarote (one is still mildly active) and the broken up lava fields look moonlike. (depending on which moon!) Weathered ash and lava are nutritious for crops such as vines, tomatoes, potatoes and many others if you can water them. Wells found water in the past but now it is by desalination plants. I made my own volcano in the kitchen. I was frying up (in healthy olive oil) local potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peppers and a soy-based protein. It smelled absolutely gorgeous. Then I dropped a glass breakfast bowl. It looked like a crater before it hit the floor – then exploded. I thought the food cooking on the hob would be safe but we found glass ejecta ‘bomb’s – aarrggh. Into the bin. We abandoned self-catering for that night and sampled local cuisine of a pasta variety. Tasty.

In other news I learnt that ARIA: Left Luggage will be released on August 1^st. Yeay. The publishers, LL-Publications have a list of reviewers now but if you are a reviewer and want one please look them up and ask at http://www.ll-publications.com

 

Image of Lanzarote courtesy of http://www.spanish-living.com/

The Dead Detective Agency by Peg Herring

What a splendid book title!

The Dead Detective Agency by Peg Herring

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

Published by LL-Publications April 2011

ISBN: 978-1905091706

A vibrant easy-going twenty-five-year-old woman, Tori, with not a single enemy in this world, is shot dead in her apartment for no apparent reason. The apparent lack of motive narks her so much she refuses to go to Heaven. Instead, she finds herself in a kind of Paradise cruise ship among others in limbo. She is being coached to accept her lot but when she learns there is an elite able to cross back she argues with the high and mighty and wins.

As a consequence we have a unique novel, in both senses of the word, where there are not only two detectives trying to solve a puzzling murder, but one of them is dead. In fact Tori is with her mentor dead detective, Seamus. The two demised sleuths can only exist back on their former world by inhabiting the living, sometimes the same one. They can jump between people but only in extreme circumstances may they make their presence felt. Readers are used to following a story through the eyes of a protagonist. However, in this tale, they are engaging the action through the eyes of a ‘ghost’ through their inhabited live person! And yet you don’t get lost. The narrative is an easy read belying the complexity of the issues.

There are light moments. For example when alive Tori tried to match-make two of her colleagues. Carmon lacks confidence and though she is enamoured with Abe, needed a shove. That came from Tori, finally, after she died. Brilliant.

There is sadness here too. Tori’s death was a tragic error, as her investigation uncovers. So much life for her that she really anticipated living, cruelly robbed. At least she is assured of an even better after-life.

Because the two dead detectives can switch hosts if in sufficient close proximity, and with the story style carrying a kind of hard-boiled gumshoe feel, this novel could rightly be called Sam Spade meets Quantum Leap. The action in the book is contemporary even though the feel is of an earlier era. The cover art, by Helen E.H. Madden, reinforces the 30s style beautifully with the depiction of Tori – her wistfulness as a limbo cruiseship passenger.

I remain a pecuniary ignoramus about how an investment bank works but in one respect I am at least up to conversationalist level. Thanks to Peg Herring, I am now informed on ‘selling away’, the underhand practise of cheating both the firm and client to the profit of a swindler. It is this practice that ultimately led to Tori’s death, and that of others in this action novel. In an interesting way this is Financial Swindling for Dummies. Thanks!

On another level I felt Tori and Seamus could have treated the reader to a more exciting time in their voyeuristic travelling inside other people. I ask myself: would I resist the temptation to learn more about women by being inside the head of one – seeing through her eyes and experiencing all her senses? No, I’d go all the way and I feel a lack of the sexual frisson and intellectual gender differences that could have been explored.

Even so, there is much novelty here to commend to the reader. Seamus, as an experienced dead detective, leaps from a man to a rat, then to a dog. Wow. Cross-species sensory travelling and Herring doesn’t disappoint. Now I know why some dogs bark all the time – they are possessed!

A line I’m sure many of us on Earth can relate to is when the policeman ‘used his remote as a weapon against commercials’. I wish I’d written that.

Overall, in spite of Earthly tragedies, we have the joyful theme that all good people make it to ‘Heaven’, whatever that is. This limbo novel has much to recommend it.  See purchasing details here.