Novels Now

The Cellist of Sarajevo paints a grim picture of what life is like for citizens of a city living during a war siege.

Steven Galloway takes a true event, a cellist who decides to play everyday on the site of a bombing and fashions a war story I won’t soon forget. Twenty-two people were killed while waiting in line for bread and the cellist decided to play for them. He wanted to do a little thing, for their memory, and for his sanity. Galloway takes three fictional characters and follows them during the weeks the cellist plays. Arrow, a sniper who is the best at her job, is assigned to protect the cellist from enemies. Dragan, an older gentlemen who has sent his wife and son to Italy for safety, but can’t bring himself to leave his beloved city. Kenan, a younger man who spends days at a time risking his life to get a water supply for his family.

This book scared me and moved me. How do people change in a situation like that? The hatred that develops, the change in character of the citizens as each person tries to survive in their own way. Some people run away, some stay and pretend it isn’t going on, and some fight back. How did the rest of the world allow this to happen: for almost 4 years the former Olympic city was under siege and electricity, food, jobs, and money were all scarce. Galloway does a wonderful job of bringing the reader into the mind and life of a citizen in the city.

This book is particularly interesting to me because I know a teacher that came from Yugoslavia. I haven’t talked to him about the specifics, but he came to Canada in the 1990s and I was thinking of him and his family while I read this book. I want to tell him about this book, but it might be too close for him to read about. For everyone else, this is a beautiful book that I think most people would like. It’s not violently graphic but you will feel what it is like to live in a European city during a war. Not that you want to experience that, but I know that the next time I hear about a country under attack, I’ll think differently.

2008, 258 pp.
Rating: 4.5/5

Stone Creek by Victoria Lustbader
Contemporary Fiction
2008 HarperCollins
Finished on 5/18/08
Rating: 3.5 (Good)

Publisher’s Description:

In a small town in upstate New York, a random meeting will offer hope and the chance of love for two lonely people.

Though he still grieves for the young wife he loved and lost, Danny, a widower, knows he must move on for the sake of Caleb, his five-year-old son. Lily has arrived at her summer house, determined to forget her yearning for a child while her high-powered workaholic husband, Paul, remains in New York.

When Lily and Danny meet while volunteering for a local charity, something immediate and undeniable happens between them. Neither one can ignore that Lily is married and ten years older than Danny, but it is Danny’s son, Caleb, who continues to bring them together. Missing his mother, Caleb is growing attached to Lily, and neither Danny nor she wants to upset the delicate balance that holds the boy’s happiness. But Danny and Lily find themselves, too, balancing on a high-wire act between happiness and despair.

Stone Creek is a novel of tremendous emotional impact that illuminates the power of love and loss to transform — and break — the human heart.

I’d never heard of Victoria Lustbader until I stumbled upon the ARC for Stone Creek. After reading the publisher’s blurb on the back cover, I decided to give it a try, thinking it might be a good summer read. Having recently read Keeper and Kid (which also centers around a father raising a young son after the death of his wife), I was curious to see how this author would handle the issue of a husband’s grief. While the plot had the potential of becoming quite sappy (say, along the lines of Danielle Steel or Nicholas Sparks), I was pleasantly surprised, deciding that it actually had more depth and style than I had expected, more like one of Anne Rivers Siddons’ or Elizabeth Berg’s works than something by Steel or Sparks. As with Berg’s domestic descriptions, Lustbader’s attention to detail enabled me to easily picture the characters and their individual settings, and I was immediately pulled into the story, finding myself looking for a free afternoon to get back to my reading (rather than pulling weeds or washing my filthy car!).

Lustbader is definitely an author I’ll read again. Her previous novel, Hidden, sounds interesting, as does her work-in-progress, currently titled Approaching The Speed of Light. Stone Creek is sure to be a popular beach read and I plan to include it on my upcoming “What’s In Your Beach Bag?” end cap at work. And, to help kick off the beginning of summer, I’m offering my Advanced Reader’s Copy to one of you lucky blogophiles. Leave me a comment and I’ll throw your name in the hat.

The Crossroads by Chris Grabenstein

Pages: 325
First Published: May 27, 2008
Genre: children, horror, ghost story
Rating: 3.5/5

First sentence:

Have you ever seen a face hidden in the bark of a tree and known that the man trapped inside wanted to hurt you?

Comments: Zack and his family move to a small rural town. On their property is a tree that Gerta Spratling has devoted as a memorial to the boyfriend who died in a crash between his car and a greyhound bus over fifty years ago. This is a very creepy, scary book. Gerta Spratling is the equivalent of an evil Miss Haversham and the spirit in the tree is evil incarnate intent on killing anyone who had anything to do with his death, right on down to the grandchildren. While most of the ghosts are creepy not all of them are bad, some even go out of their way to help Zack and his stepmother, Judy, such as the traveling salesman, a bus driver, three nuns and a group of children bound for Bible camp at the time of the crash.

This is a fast read. Short chapters propel the reading along. The ending was predictable to this reader but still the characters were a lot of fun, even the nasty ones. I enjoyed the book but the 11 year old protagonist felt too young for this mature story. I’d recommend this for the 10-12 year age range. Older teens will find the main character too childish and younger children will either find the book too scary or just won’t relate to a very old lady and her dead boyfriend.

The Eyes of a King by Catherine Banner
First in a Trilogy

Pages: 435
First Published: May 27, 2008
Genre: YA fantasy
Rating: 4.5/5

First sentence:

These are the last words I will write..

Comments: Wow, this was an amazing book. There are so many layers to the story that I find it difficult to attempt to summarize but attempt I will. The main narrator, Leo, lives in the world of Malonia. This is a military run world. Soldiers patrol the streets. Children go to military school to learn to fight not so much to read and write. Children with powers are sent to ’special’ schools where they are locked up and kept under control. People with mental problems are labeled ‘Unacceptables’ and taken away by soldiers. It is in this world that Leo lives and one day he finds a blank book. But words start appearing in the book and a story unfolds. It is a tale set in a fairy tale land called England about the boy who should be the true king of Malonia, but was exiled to this world when his father, the former King, and his mother were murdered.

Both story lines follow two teenage boys, approx. the same age. They are relatively happy, or shall we say content at the beginning but events happen in their lives and they become aware of realities and truths that lead them into sadness and despair. A running theme throughout the novel is that there are other things in life besides being happy. This is a dark tale; one that is melancholy and sad. If you like your books to have a happy ending you won’t find one hear but you will find acceptance and a glimmer of hope.

I really enjoyed this book. It has such a melancholy atmosphere, I found myself occasionally putting it down briefly to gather my thoughts. The characters are wonderfully developed and I found myself feeling deeply for all concerned. This is the first in a proposed trilogy and I very much look forward to following these characters into the sequel. This haunting fantasy with mature themes of death, suicide, and war is recommended to older YAs and adults.

The Space Between Before and After by Jean Reynolds Page
Contemporary Fiction
2008 Avon (HarperCollins)
Quit on 5/12/08
Rating: DNF

Product Description

Forty-two and divorced, Holli Templeton has just begun to realize the pleasures of owning her life for the first time. But the experience is short-lived. Her son Conner has unexpectedly fled college in Rhode Island and moved to Texas with his troubled girlfriend, Kilian. This alone is difficult to handle, but as Holli begins to understand the depth of the girl’s problems, concern turns to crisis.

Conner’s situation is worsening, and as if that’s not enough, Holli notices signs of serious decline in the beloved Texas grandmother who raised her. She has no choice but to leave the comfort zone of life in New York and return to her hometown in Texas to care for the people she loves.

In the tight space between these two generations, Holli initially feels lost. The journey back stirs so many unresolved hurts from her childhood. But something else happens in this uneasy homecoming. Comfort arrives in the ethereal presence of the mother long lost to her, and Holli is surprised to find that as she struggles to help her son and grandmother, the wounds of her own past begin to heal.

The space between before and after—easily the most challenging place she has ever known—begins to reveal an unanticipated hope for what the future might hold.

After 134 pages, I decided to call it quits on this novel. I found I simply wasn’t interested in any of the characters and couldn’t stay focused on the plot. But not to worry. I’m not in a slump. My current read is fabulous and I can’t wait to get back to it. It’s a lovely day and I’m heading out to the deck with my book, dog and a cocktail. It’s five-o’clock somewhere!

Skeletons at the Feast
By Chris Bohjalian
Completed May 12, 2008

Many books have explored the exodus of Europeans and Jews who fled the approaching German army during World War II. In Skeletons at the Feast, Chris Bohjalian examined another type of evacuation – this time of a Prussian family trying to stay steps ahead of the vengeful Soviet army.

Loosely based on a diary of young Prussian girl, the story followed Anna, her mother (Mutti), her young brother, Theo, and Callum, a Scottish POW who was assigned to Anna’s estate in Prussia. Together, they migrated on foot during the harsh winter to the safety of western Germany. Intermingled with Anna’s story were also the narratives of Uri, a young Jewish man who disguised himself as a German soldier to escape concentration camps, and Cecile, a French Jewish woman who was imprisoned at a German “work camp.” All of these stories showed the atrocities of war on civilians and how they endured the hardships of fatigue, hunger, severe weather and artillery fire.

In the depiction of Cecile and her fellow female prisoners, Bohjalian spared no details. It was downright graphic. So too were the scenes that depicted the bitterness of the Soviet army as they invaded Germany. These scenes were hard to read and not for the faint of heart. I often wonder how these things happened within recent history, and then I remember that genocide still goes on – just in a different place to different people. And that’s why I think it’s important to read books such as Skeletons at the Feast, even though it can be hard to do so.

Skeletons at the Feast had a pedestrian approach to a hard subject matter. There was no deep symbolism or foreshadowing in this book – just words and lines strung together to tell a story. However, I often found that Bohjalian employed the “tell, not show” type of narrative, and the different character viewpoints were, at first, unparalleled and hard to follow. Nonetheless, the book was a page turner – one I would recommended to readers who enjoy books set during World War II or the Holocaust. (4/5)

Madapple by Christina Meldrum

Pages: 410
First Published: May 13, 2008
Genre: YA, literary fiction
Rating: 4/5

First sentence:
The women resemble schoolgirls with gangly limbs, ruddy cheeks, plaited flaxen hair; they walk holding hands.

Comments: Aslaug has been raised by her mother in near isolation in a rural area with only one nearby neighbour. They spend much of their time gathering plants and Aslaug knows the properties of every plant in the area. They eat what they forage, nuts, seeds, roots, grains and teas. Then Maren, Aslaug’s mother dies and Aslaug finds relatives she knew nothing about and she moves from one kind of isolation to another. She learns the secret of her birth, her mother’s insistence of her virgin birth and as each family secret is uncovered the reality becomes darker and more horrendous. As the book opens we find Aslaug on trial for a double homicide.

This is an immensely deep and powerful book. It reads as a modern dark fairy tale. There is an ethereal quality to the story which feels as if it comes from the same place as one’s dreams or nightmares. Religion plays a big part from controversial topics and theology of the Essenes to the pagan beginnings of Christianity to waiting for the return of the Messiah. Darker topics of child abuse, rape and incest add to the potent force of the book.

I was hooked from the first chapter. The short court scenes that alternated with the lyrical narrative propelled my reading along and I found it very difficult to put down. This is quite unlike any book I’ve read before. I wonder if perhaps it’s a bit deep for a YA book and would hesitate to recommend it for under 16s but otherwise highly recommended.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite passages:

And yet, the more Mother teaches me science, the more cracks I see, and the more cracks it seems Mother must see. Science describes the world; it doesn’t explain it; it can describe the universe’s formation, but it can’t explain why such an event would have occurred, how something can come from nothing. That’s the miracle.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway is a moving story based on fact. It chronicles the few days in Sarajevo during 1992 when the real “Cellist of Sarajevo,” Vedran Smailovic, played his cello for 22 days in the exact spot where 22 people had been killed while waiting in line for bread.

In the novel, a counter-sniper, Arrow, is assigned to keep the cellist from getting shot and killed. Arrow is the best at what she does but still wrestles with the moral dilemma of having to take another’s life. She wonders if she is any better than the men in the hills trying to destroy her city.

We also meet Kenan, a man on his way to fetch water for his family, and we follow his life-threatening journey as well as his thoughts, fears, and hopes for the future. Another character, Dragan, misses his family, whom he helped to get out of the country. All of them are waiting. Waiting for help that never comes.

Told in a simple but unforgettable style, Galloway captures this unfortunate moment in history in a way that will break your heart for all victims of war.

This book will be released on May 15 from Riverhead Books.

2008, 231 pp.
Rating: 4/5

“Why do you suppose he’s there? Is he playing for the people who died? Or is he playing for the people who haven’t? What does he hope to accomplish?” -From The Cellist of Sarajevo-

The Siege of Sarajevo began April 5, 1992 and lasted almost four years. Approximately 10,000 people were killed, and 56,000 wounded - most were civilians. Embedded in these numbers are thousands of personal stories. One of those stories includes Vedran Smailovic, a musician who witnessed 22 of his friends and neighbors killed by a mortar shell while they were waiting to buy bread in May 1992. In response to this horrific event, Smailovic sat in the square where his friends had died and played his cello for 22 days - one day for each life. This small, but significant human response to the war touched Steven Galloway - a Canadian writer who had never been to Sarajevo, but who began to think about hate and the essential ingredients of humanity. The result is The Cellist of Sarajevo - a profoundly moving and universal novel about what it means to be human in the face of atrocity.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is the story of four regular people and their response to war and hate. The cellist is the character who unites the story threads. His music is the backdrop to the core stories which Galloway tells in taut, yet simple prose. Kenan is living with his sister and her family - he has managed to send his wife and son away from Sarajevo to safety and he often thinks about what it would be like to leave Sarajevo and join them. In the meantime, he avoids old friends and focuses on his survival - trying to cross an intersection where a sniper waits. Dragan lives with his wife and two small children. He has avoided engaging in the conflict and every four days must go to get water for his family and elderly neighbor - a woman who is unkind, cold, and selfish. Arrow is a young woman who will not acknowledge her real name - the name that represents who she was before the war. She now works as a sniper for the forces within the city. Before the end of the novel, all three will have to decide whether or not they will allow the war to make decisions for them and steal their humanity, or if instead they will reach out to another person and do what is right, even if it means they will not survive.

I was moved to tears at the end of this short novel. Galloway writes exquisitely. He shows the reader the simple lives of his characters and defines the essence of what it means to be human. The novel makes the reader wonder what he or she would do faced with similar circumstances. It asks the big questions. As Galloway points out in his short introduction: The themes and characters exist wherever ordinary people find themselves caught in war. Sarajevo could be Lebanon or Chechnya or Iraq or a half-dozen other places.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is required reading. Beautifully crafted and heavy with truth, it is one I can highly recommend. Rated 5/5.

For 22 days in 1992 during the siege of Sarajevo, local cellist Vedran Smailovic played in the spot where a mortar killed 22 people who were standing in line for bread. At any time while he played, he could have been shot by a sniper, but he survived each day, committing a small but significant act of resistance that became the inspiration for Steven Galloway’s new book, The Cellist of Sarajevo.

In this book, Galloway depicted the the lives of three (fictional) Sarajevo residents: Arrow, a sniper with deadly accuracy, sent to protect The Cellist; Kenan, a married father of three who risked his life every five days to get water for his family and neighbor; and Dragan, a man whose wife and son evacuated to Italy, which left him alone and unconnected to his fellow humans.

The Cellist was a minor character in the book, but his 22 days of music were what bound these characters’ stories. For the characters, The Cellist inspired each one to defy the atrocities around them, by doing human tasks, such as removing a body from the street or getting water for a cranky neighbor. By committing these acts, each character proved that while the war raged on, they were committed to being human. To survive the siege, the characters not only had to dodge snipers, but keep the spirit of Sarajevo alive within them.

Undoubtedly, Galloway swept the reader into the besieged Sarajevo so that you heard the gunfire and The Cellist’s music; you saw the shelled buildings and the haggard looks on people’s faces; you felt the citizens’ desperation as they looked for food or firewood. Galloway’s ability to transport readers to this place in modern history made The Cellist of Sarajevo so impactful and unforgettable.

Thankfully, Sarajevo is making a comeback, but it’s important that books like this one are being published so people can learn more about what this city and its citizens endured – and ultimately how their small acts of defiance during the siege laid the groundwork for Sarajevo’s restoration now.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about how people can rise above the ugliness of the world around us. (5/5)

The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg
Nonfiction - Memoir
2008 Knopf
Finished on 3/30/08
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)
ARC - Due out on May 6, 2008

Book Description

In this final volume of the beloved American saga that began with All Over but the Shoutin’ and continued with Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg closes his circle of family stories with an unforgettable tale about fathers and sons inspired by his own relationship with his ten-year-old stepson.

He learns, right from the start, that a man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog who chases a car and wins. He discovers that he is unsuited to fatherhood, unsuited to fathering this boy in particular, a boy who does not know how to throw a punch and doesn’t need to; a boy accustomed to love and affection rather than violence and neglect; in short, a boy wholly unlike the child Rick once was, and who longs for a relationship with Rick that Rick hasn’t the first inkling of how to embark on. With the weight of this new boy tugging at his clothes, Rick sets out to understand his father, his son, and himself.

The Prince of Frogtown documents a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of Rick’s youth, to Jacksonville’s one-hundred-year-old mill, the town’s blight and salvation; and to a troubled, charismatic hustler coming of age in its shadow, Rick’s father, a man bound to bring harm even to those he truly loves. And the book documents the unexpected corollary to it, the marvelous journey of Rick’s later life: a journey into fatherhood, and toward a child for whom he comes to feel a devotion that staggers him. With candor, insight, tremendous humor, and the remarkable gift for descriptive storytelling on which he made his name, Rick Bragg delivers a brilliant and moving rumination on the lives of boys and men, a poignant reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.

It’s been almost a decade since I first heard of Rick Bragg. I absolutely loved his first memoir, All Over but the Shoutin’, savoring the beautifully crafted sentences, laughing and crying my way through the entire book. It’s one of the first memoirs I’d ever read and I was so moved by Bragg’s story and writing, I bought several copies to give at Christmastime that year.

When Ava’s Man was about to come out, a former co-worker sent me an Advance Reader’s Copy. I couldn’t wait to return to Bragg’s lyrical writing and quickly finished the book I was reading. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get past the first few chapters of Ava’s Man, despite two separate attempts. I was so disappointed!

So when that same friend sent me an ARC of The Prince of Frogtown, I was a little more prepared when it, too, failed to live up to All Over But the Shoutin’. However, unlike with Ava’s Man, I stuck with it, determined to read the entire book. (Which I did, although I have to admit that did skim a chapter or two.)

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers, I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn’t hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. It took something as powerful as that, as girls to tug me away from this tribe of sunburned little boys, to scatter us from this place of double-dog dares, Blow Pops, Cherry Bombs, Indian burns, chicken fights, and giggling, half-wit choruses of “Bald-Headed Man from China.” Maybe we should have nailed up a sign–NO GIRLS ALLOWED–and lived out our lives here, to fight mean bulls from the safe side of a barbed-wire fence with a cape cut from a red tank top, and duel to the death with swords sliced of a weeping willow tree. I don’t know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy.

And so begins The Prince of Frogtown. I love the way Bragg writes. It’s impossible to read his words and think he’s from anywhere but the South. His sentences have a cadence that make me want to read them over and over again, listening as I would to a favorite song.

It was the year I realized the TV preachers’ rants on hell were all wrong, that the devil lives in Alabama, and swims in a Mason jar. He lost his looks, drank his paychecks, wrecked his old cars, and stiffed the Tennessee Valley Electric until all they would give us was free dark.

My biggest complaint lies not in the writing, but the focus of The Prince of Frogtown. I wish Bragg had written more about his relationship with his stepson and less about his father. But obviously, as the title tells us, the book is really more about the latter, with short (2-3 page) vignettes about his stepson. And yet I wonder if I really would have liked it better if the emphasis were more on his own parenting, than the lack of his father’s. In spite of the lyrical prose, there were times I thought, I don’t really like this man (Rick, not Charles) at all. I was really put off by Bragg’s initial attitude toward his young stepson. He didn’t understand the boy, felt he was pampered and spoiled by his mother, and he doesn’t hesitate to tell the reader just how he feels about his new life as a husband and father.

I was born into a people who could cuss the horns off a bull, before revival and after dinner on the ground, but he lived in a world rated G with candy sprinkles on top.

And there were times when I though he was downright mean-spirited toward the boy. After reading the following blurb from a Kirkus review, I see I’m not the only one who had these same reservations about the book:

Alternating chapters on his unnamed stepson, by contrast, resound more with the annoyance Bragg feels at the start than the love he professes at the end, at which point the author sounds uncomfortably self-congratulatory about the maturation of his stepson, now “the man I rushed him to be.”

Personally, I’d rather be a pampered and spoiled child than grow up amongst dog-fighting, cock-fighting, gambling drunks.

Bragg’s love for the boy he calls his son begins to show itself toward the end of the book, tugging at my heartstrings in spite of myself:

I waited for him, as he got older, to torture me with rap, or heavy metal, or plastic top forty. But one day he heard Johnny Cash, and his life changed. I heard him in his room, singing “Get Rhythm” and “Folsom Prison Blues.”

He sings well. His voice is deep, strong. He sings from the backseat. He sings to the dog. I stood in the kitchen recently and watched him sing as he walked around in the yard. It was one of the finer moments in my life.

And, I couldn’t help but chuckle when he poked fun at women:

He does not like girls, yet.

“Why do they talk so fast?” he asked me. “I can’t understand what they say.”

“That’s all right, boy,” I said. “You won’t be able to understand them when they talk slow, either.”

But the sprinkles of humor and touching sentiments are few and far between. I’ll be interested to see what others think of the book once it’s published. Meanwhile, All Over But the Shoutin’ remains one of my all-time favorite memoirs. It might just be time for another reading.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Good+)

First Sentence: In Provincetown, I felt enveloped in the shivery skin of a paranoid, all goose-bumps and heartbeat.

Comments: Mark Winslow, son of a jazz singer turned painter, gave up his day job to try his hand at acting. He takes his act to Cape Cod, settling into Provincetown where he has friends, hoping to land a gig for his comedy troupe. A promising summer stretches out before them, and Mark is confident that they will make a splash on the scene. Unfortunately, that is not what is meant to be.

A dog murdered and left on the doorsteps of a prominent gay resident in the area only proves to be a foreshadowing of what is to come. When a well-known gay resident is brutally murdered, tempers and fears in the community rage and concerns of discrimination and hate crimes bubble to the surface. Attention shifts to the Christian Soldiers, who have recently moved to town to spread their own interpretation of the Gospel. The town also has seen an increase in what appear to be runaways, dirty young people, with sticky fingers, preferring shoplifting over paying.

Mark is at the center of it all when he discovers the body of his childhood friend. Knowing that he will be the first suspect the police turn to because of an argument he had with the deceased not long before, he decides against reporting the discovery. Instead, he starts asking questions of his own, hoping to get to the bottom of the murder. The more questions Mark asks, the more attention he gets, and danger inevitably follows.

The novel takes awhile to get off the ground as the author sets the stage for the events to come. Mark Winslow is the naïve and curious protagonist, who at times I found a little exasperating but still likeable. He is trying to find his way in the world, both career wise and on a personal level. He grew up never knowing who his father was and, as a result, felt something has been missing from his life all along. Mark seems to make friends easily and knows how to use his acting skills to get what he wants in tight situations; still, he takes more risks than he should, not always thinking things out first.

Provincetown is an established community, full of diversity and a mixture of year round residents and summer vacationers. For the most part, it is a peaceful community where everyone gets along. Stephen Anable’s introduction of a right wing religious group into a liberal town was sure to spark controversy, and so it does. In addition, there is a profound dichotomy between the wealthy and those who have much less. The novel at times seems just as much a glimpse into the psyche of a community and the character of Mark as it is into the mystery itself.

Author Stephen Anable has crafted a unique and intriguing mystery with a myriad of characters, each with their own foibles and quirks. He packs quite a few different plot threads throughout the novel that will keep the reader guessing right up until all is revealed at the end. Suspenseful with a teaspoon of romance, The Fisher Boy is an entertaining novel.