Starvation
Lake
A
Gus Carpenter Mystery
Bryan
Gruley
Touchstone
(Trade Paperback)
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6362-8 (1416563628)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6362-4 (9781416563624)
Publication Date: March 2009
List Price: $14.00
Synopsis (from
the publisher): In the dead of a Michigan winter, pieces of a
snowmobile wash up near the crumbling small town of Starvation
Lake—the same snowmobile that went down with
Starvation’s legendary hockey coach years earlier. But
everybody knows Coach Blackburn’s accident happened five
miles away on a different lake. As rumors buzz about mysterious
underground tunnels, the evidence from the snowmobile says one thing:
murder.
Gus Carpenter, editor of the local newspaper, has recently returned to
Starvation after a failed attempt to make it big at the Detroit Times.
In his youth, Gus was the goalie that let a state championship get
away, crushing Coach’s dreams and earning the
town’s enmity. Now he’s investigating the murder of
his former coach. But even more unsettling to Gus are the holes in the
town’s past, and the gnawing suspicion that those holes may
conceal some dark and disturbing secrets—secrets that some of
the people closest to him may have killed to keep.
Review:
Bryan Gruley's debut mystery, Starvation
Lake,
introduces newspaper editor and reporter Gus Carpenter investigating
the decade old mysterious death of his hockey coach.
Jack Blackburn was more than a coach: he was a mentor to the boys of
Starvation, a small town in the upper region of the lower peninsula of
Michigan. Throughout the 1970s Blackburn helped put Starvation on the
map, turning it into a hockey powerhouse in the state. As a teenager,
Gus and his buddies were regulars on the team and in their final year
of high school they had a chance to bring the state championship to
Starvation. In a play the townspeople will never let him forget, goalie
Gus let the opposing team's winning puck by him, depriving the school
of the championship and the town of bragging rights. To escape the
humiliation, Gus left for Detroit to pursue a career as a reporter.
During the time Gus was away, Coach Blackburn had a tragic and fatal
accident, falling through the lake's ice one winter while snowmobiling.
His body was never recovered. Now, years later, Gus is back in
Starvation as editor of the local paper. Blackburn's snowmobile has
just washed up on the shore of a different lake reopening the mystery
of the circumstances of his death. Gus' reporting instincts tell him
there's a story here, but as he digs deeper he comes to realize that
the coach he so much admired is someone he may never have really known
at all.
Starvation
Lake is alternately a
brilliantly written novel and a seriously flawed one. On the positive
side is the complex, deeply conflicted character of Gus Carpenter. The
story is told from his perspective and as a newspaper reporter with
deep roots in his community this approach works well. The other
characters are nearly as richly drawn and the setting is perfect. The
mystery itself is more than a little derivative, but it's handled
exceptionally well. Starvation Lake sets out strong and ends even
stronger, but it is the middle 150 pages or so that nearly derails the
reader's interest.
For starters, the inevitable twist is hardly unexpected as it is
foreshadowed quite early. No reader is going to be taken by surprise.
As such, it takes far too long for the story to reveal it. But once it
finally happens, the plot is quickly able to regain the momentum that
was so perilously close to being completely lost due to the mid-book
inclusion of (1) a steady stream of backstories and (2) the seemingly
endless recounting of hockey games, past and present. Though some of
the backstories are admittedly relevant to the plot, most seem to
simply exist as transitional filler. As tedious as they can be, they
are still far more interesting than the hockey games. Even the most
ardent sports fans would be hard-pressed not to start skimming through
the play-by-plays here.
An ambivalent review, to be sure. More positive than negative, still,
it's disappointing that a more critical eye towards editing Starvation Lake
wasn't exercised. (A postscripted Q and A with the author suggests this
is the first of a series to feature Gus Carpenter.)
Special thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing an ARC of Starvation Lake for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Have you read Starvation Lake? How would you rate it?
Mysteries in this series ...
Starvation Lake
Touchstone (Trade Paperback), March 2009
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6362-8 (1416563628)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6362-4 (9781416563624)
Omnimystery keywords for Starvation Lake ...
Location(s) referenced: Michigan.
