Local Poet by Paul Trembling | book review
Local Poet by Paul Trembling
About the book: (from the publisher) Rob Seaton killed a woman.
Rob doesn’t know Laney Grey. But when she deliberately steps out in front of his van and dies on impact, his life will never be the same.
Now Rob is driven to know who she was, why she chose to die, and why he had to be part of her death.
To understand her, he must read her poetry.
To know her, he must unravel the mysteries of her past.
As Laney’s dark secret starts to come to light, and Rob’s innocence is questioned, he must learn the full truth.
But truth comes at a cost. Will Rob be the one who has to pay the price?
About the author: Paul Trembling got into the habit of making up stories before he could read or write. Since then, he’s followed a diverse career path, being at various times a seaman, a missionary, a janitor, and a crime scene investigator―but he’s never broken the story-making habit, and has no plans to try.
Genre: Fiction/Mystery
[bctt tweet=”Gripping and atmospheric novella-length #mystery. A winner. @Paul_Trembling @KregelBooks” username=”KatherineSJones”]
My take: I can make this review as short and sweet as the book itself: A winner. I liked everything about it, from its swift plotting to its atmospheric London setting and Everyman protagonist… to the mysterious Laney, whose poetry offers the key to unlocking the riddle of the crime.
Cleverly executed from start to finish, I found each of the 150-some-odd pages in this compact, literary thriller a pleasure.
My one and only issue — which is more a curiosity than a complaint — is that the term for inciting incident, the RTC, was not spelled out in the first chapter, which even bears the acronym as its title. I went back and skimmed the first pages to see if I’d missed it, but I don’t think I did. I had to Google it to finally understand that RTC = Road Traffic Collision in British police parlance — something this American Anglophile did not know.
Local Poet would provide the perfect slim read to tuck in your tote for summer travel, easily and entertainingly consumed in a cross-country flight or day-long road-trip. Already looking forward to the sequel, Local Artist.
Thanks to Lion Hudson/Kregel Publications for providing me this book free of charge. All opinions are mine.
After words: What novella-length fiction have you enjoyed recently?