Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and The Wild West: Doc Savage! The Shadow! Shiwan Khan! It's Will Mur...

Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and The Wild West: Doc Savage! The Shadow! Shiwan Khan! It's Will Mur...: The Shadow lives, and he’s more alive than ever in this second meeting between The Man of Bronze and The Master of Darkness. Shadow...

Rough Edges: Now Available: Weird Menace Volume 1

Rough Edges: Now Available: Weird Menace Volume 1: The Weird Menace pulps flourished for less than a decade, from the mid-1930s to the early '40s, but while they were popular, they del...

Rough Edges: Coming Soon: Weird Menace Volume 1

Rough Edges: Coming Soon: Weird Menace Volume 1: That cover sort of says it all, doesn't it? And this is only the first volume. Volume 2 will also be out later this month. UPDATE: ...

Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and The Wild West: DOC SAVAGE meets THE SHADOW: "The Sinister Shadow"...

Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and The Wild West: DOC SAVAGE meets THE SHADOW: "The Sinister Shadow"...: I am in awe of this book. Pulp fans like me have been dreaming about a Doc/Shadow encounter for decades, and The Sinister Shadow ...

Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and The Wild West: Forgotten Books: THE CONTINENTAL OP (1974) by Dash...

Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and The Wild West: Forgotten Books: THE CONTINENTAL OP (1974) by Dash...: I'm in an Op mood this week because my story "The Continental Opposite" (bringing the old guy out of retirement) appears i...

Review: "Caddo Cold: A Bill Travis Mystery" by George Wier

The seventh in the series finds Bill Travis once again trying to help a client who has also become a friend. A familiar pattern in these novels and one that played out in the first book The Last Call. That resulted, among other things, in a marriage to Julie, and a number of children. Neither will happen with Travis trying to help Holt Gatlin.

When Holt Gatlin went off the roof of the defunct theater in Karnack, Texas he hit the ground hard.  Everyone knows he was lucky to not break his neck. What hardly anyone besides Bill Travis knows is that Holt is not only lucky he is also two million dollars richer thanks to a recent stock split and some fast stock trades orchestrated by Travis. It helps to have a man handling your bank accounts who knows what he is doing. Travis needs to update Holt and finally tracks him down to a hospital in Marshall where he learns the elderly man has a broken arm, broken wrist, and three cracked ribs, and a severely broken leg.

Holt is busted up pretty good and for good reason. That doesn’t explain the strange comments from Holt about something happening out at Caddo Lake fifty years ago. Something bad happened out there one night in 1960 and clearly it has haunted Holt ever since. Before Travis can find out what happened, Holt starts crying and ends the call by hanging up.

Before long Bill and his college bound daughter Jessica are headed towards Holt’s hospital room in Marshall to find some answers. As Christmas approaches, answers will be hard to come by in a case that moves along the shores and deep into Caddo Lake. It isn’t just the weather causing things to be cold and deadly.

“Caddo Cold” is the latest in a series that is part mystery, part thriller, and all adventure. Like in Slow Falling there is a definite pulp angle to the tale and a clear appreciation of them by author George Weir. As a result this is a book that is filled with missing bodies, secret scientific research, and secret military experiments. That along with a complicated mystery makes this another very good one in the series. While it certainly could be read as a stand alone, it is much better to read these books in series order starting with The Last Call.

Caddo Cold: A Bill Travis Mystery

George Wier

http://www.georgewier.com

Flagstone Books

April 2012

E-Book

(Estimated print length 167 pages)

$3.99

Material provided by the author in exchange for my objective review.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2012

Author of the e-book short story collection Mind Slices available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords in a variety of formats. Contributor to the Carpathian Shadows, Volume II anthology available in print and e-book.

Tangent, Dave Truesdale, Otto Penzler and The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

I mentioned awhile back that I was doing some review work for Tangent Online. Not nearly as much as I would like do between my ongoing health stuff, deadlines at Tangent, and my own deadlines for other existing projects and whatnot. Hopefully, in the future, my Tangent work load will pick up a little more there as I figure out a way to do everything I want to do as well what I can do.

In the meantime, the editor of Tangent Online, Dave Truesdale is making some changes of his own and expanding the site a bit into the mystery realm by way of the pulps. Dave explained in detail his rationale for doing so in his “A New Direction” editorial last month. As part of that, he recently interviewed Otto Penzler regarding his new book, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

and other topics. The interview is now up and makes for some very interesting reading. It can be found at

http://www.tangentonline.com/interviews-columnsmenu-166/1487-interview-otto-penzler

Drop by and take a look. Lots of good stuff on the site and worthy of your time.

Kevin

http://kevinrtipple.com/