Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman

The Day the Music Died by Ed Gorman (Carroll & Graf, 1999) is the first of 10 books about Sam McCain, a lawyer in Black River Falls, Iowa. The small town already has more lawyers than it can readily support so Sam ekes out a living as an investigator for Judge Esme Anne Whitney, who shoots rubber bands at him whenever they meet in her chambers. It’s February 1959, and Sam is stunned to hear about the death of Richie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly in a plane crash, just days after Sam took co-worker Pamela Forrest to what turned out to be Buddy Holly’s last concert.

Judge Whitney pulls him away from participating in the national mourning for the rock idol to look into the death of her ne’er-do-well nephew’s wife. His task is complicated by the nephew’s suicide almost immediately thereafter, which solves the case as far as Police Chief Cliff Sykes is concerned. Sykes loathes Judge Whitney and her family and is delighted for the opportunity to publicly humiliate them. When Sam takes Judge Whitney’s part in believing the nephew is innocent, Sam also incurs the police chief’s ire.

Sam’s personal life isn’t going much better. His teenage sister is pregnant, afraid to tell their parents, and is wondering how to get an abortion. Sam is terrified she will fall prey to a back-street abortionist and doesn’t know what to do. The woman he loves, Pamela Forrest, is madly in love with Stu Grant, who is engaged to someone else, while Mary Travers is desperately in love with Sam, who isn’t especially interested in her, so she has accepted the local pharmacist’s proposal of marriage, although she doesn’t care about him. It is hard to understand just how so many mis-matches are possible in such a small social circle.

This series incisively captures the cultural changes of the late 1950s and 1960s and their impact on countless small towns in the heartland of the nation. In a sociological timeline it ranged from the death of Buddy Holly (“The Day the Music Died”) through the civil rights movement and burgeoning feminism to the Vietnamese conflict. Ed Gorman (1941-2016) grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which informed his on-point descriptions of small-town life. He was a well-known genre writer and short fiction anthologist and the recipient of multiple literary awards. I consider this series some of the best of his very good work.

·         Hardcover: 212 pages

·         Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub; 1st Carroll & Graf ed edition (January 1, 1999)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0786705698

·         ISBN-13: 978-0786705696

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Mercy Kill by Lori Armstrong

Mercy Kill  by Lori Armstrong (Touchstone, 2011) is the second of three mysteries about Mercy Gunderson, a former Army sharpshooter returned home to her native western South Dakota. Like many returned veterans, Mercy is having trouble finding a sense of purpose and figuring out her place on her family’s ranch, which is being threatened by an oil pipeline. After going on a months-long bender, she gives up drinking for a bartending job in a friend’s local dive. She learns when he visits the dive that the representative sent by the oil pipeline company to coax the locals into accepting the incursion across their land is a former squad leader who saved her life in Iraq.

Her deep sense of obligation kicks in when she finds his body outside the bar after closing up one night. Since he was roundly despised by nearly everyone, the pool of suspects is considerable. She could tell from her interactions with him at the bar that Jason was no longer the person she knew in Iraq; she realized just how much he had changed when she learns he had hundreds of bottles of prescription painkillers in his suitcase. Everything points to a drug deal gone sidewise and the most likely culprits the psychopath drug dealers from the nearby reservation, feared by all who know them. Curiously, or perhaps not, considering the reputation of the drug dealers, the local sheriff seems disinclined to pursue the case so Mercy feels that she must get to the truth of Jason’s death herself.

A complicated gritty story with well-defined characters and a sharply delineated location. The scenery of western South Dakota in the spring comes alive here and makes living there understandable. Mercy is a complex person seeking to understand herself and to find a new way to relate to the people around her. She was a little too gleeful about shooting prairie dogs for me to find her wholly likeable, however.

There were many references to events in the preceding book but I do not think it is necessary to read these books in order to fully understand them.

·         Paperback: 320 pages

·         Publisher: Touchstone; Original edition (January 11, 2011)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 1416590978

·         ISBN-13: 978-1416590972

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal IT projects by day and reads mysteries at night.