Death of Choice – Book

Death of Choice Eight Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Mystery Compiled by Micheal Maxwell    (2015) Kindle E-book

When you grab a book with this kind of title you are expecting murder to figure heavily in the stories.  In fact, it figures in about half.  The real problem here is that there’s not much effort put into many of these “mysteries”.  In the end, that leaves the book with an unsatisfying taste.

 “Madam Koska and the Le Spectre de la Rose” by Ilil Arbe. A murder at an expatriate Russian ballet company.  Arbe gets a little too caught up in trying to “write” the Russian accents but otherwise a pretty good story.

 “Till The Clouds Roll” by Michael Maxwell involves a death so it is a murder mystery, but solving the mystery is secondary to the eventual story.  Didn’t wow me.

“The End of June “ by Jane Carver. A sister is found dead in her own barn, cause of death?  Not clear.  An interesting whimsey to the story (it took me a while to catch the name game) and a nicely done, simple mystery.

“The Ferguson Shooting” by Wayne Zurl. One of two by the author in the collection.  Obviously written as a platform for the author’s political views on police shootings.  Sadly, the story gets stuffed here.  Disappointing.

“ The Girl On the Beach” by Kay Hadashi. This is kind of an odd one.  Nicely written, but no murder, the cause of death is discovered quickly.  The mystery becomes the victim’s identity.  The illogical “CSI” trope of a medical examiner who spends significant time in the field doing investigation detracts from an otherwise decent story.

“White Turtle and the Children’s Cemetery” by Michael Maxwell. This one will set some people off.  The story doesn’t go where you think it will (or where you want it to).  The story is delightfully strange,  My vote for the best writing in the collection, but bound to be most people’s least favorite.

“The Box” by Kay Hadashi. A mystery without a resolution.  I have very little room to complain on that account but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to end the story the way it does.  Nicely written, but unsatisfying.

“A Fire and Old Ice” by Wayne Zurl.  The author again lets his personal “thing” get in the way of the story.  Beyond the fact that his main character is an HR nightmare (and a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen), Zurl gets hung up on trying to write out an NYPD transplant cop’s accent, a Tennessee accent, a Jewish accent and toss in as much Yiddish as the story can carry.  It’s distracting, interrupts the storytelling (the ultimate sin for me) and comes off like the work of a bad writer.  He shows (at times here and in the other story) that he has some ability as a writer.  But the story falls flat.