A couple of Saturday’s ago, I was browsing through the books at Barnes & Noble and I came across The Last Dead Girl, Book # 3 in the David Loogan series written by Harry Dolan. On the dust jacket of the book I read that Stephen King called Dolan’s book Bad Things Happen “a “great f***ing book“! When I came home, I went to my local libraries website and requested the book. I was captivated by the book from the opening sentence, the pages flew by and it quickly became Book 29 of 2014, and I agree with Mr King in is a great f***king book!
The reader first meets the protagonist of the book, the mysterious David Loogan, while he is purchasing a shovel and some assorted gardening supplies, only David is not going to be doing any gardening,, no he is going to be digging a grave! A grave in which he and his new employer Tom Kristoll, owner and editor of the mystery magazine Gray Streets, will bury a body. Days later, Tom Kristoll plummets from his sixth floor office window the victim of an apparent suicide. Was it really suicide or was it murder? David thinks it’s murder, as does Elizabeth Waishkey a top detective in the Ann Arbor Police Department, Soon the action in the book begins to follow the typical formula of a Gray Streets mystery “Plans go wrong, Bad Things Happen, People Die” As more bodies pile up, David is determined to discover who killed his friend, and while Elizabeth wants to believe David is an innocent player in the mystery, ,after a detective from New York shows up and reveals that Loogan was once indicted for MURDER, that becomes a little harder!
This book was a real page turner for me I agree wholeheartedly with what Publishers Weekly says about the book in their starred review of the book
“Dolan gets everything right in his debut….Pitch-perfect prose and sophisticated characterizations driven by the noirish plot, which offers plenty of unexpected twists. Fans of Peter Abraham and Scott Turow will find a lot to like…. The talent Dolan displays suggests he has a bright future.”
I couldn’t have said it better himself!
Bottomline: A great page-turner, written by an expert at simple prose that conveys way more, in way less! A book that sends you looking for the next book in the series, which I have already requested from my library!!
Grade A – Check It Out!!
