Niceville

Which Blog:

Staff Choices

Author:

Carsten Stroud

This post is about:

Books

ISBN #:

9780307700957

This is the first book I've read by Carsten Stroud [1]. I was drawn to the book's front cover where Elmore Leonard [2] was quoted as saying it had "...Terrific dialogue...and...oddball characters..." That was endorsement enough for me.

This epic story has a multitude of characters. So many that readers might want to keep a yellow pad handy to track names. At times it seems that each chapter is introducing yet another person of interest. Their back-stories are presented methodically.

Stroud indeed has a method to his madness. A young boy vanishes in the blink of an eye. A former police officer and a current one commit a brazen bank robbery in broad daylight; killing several brother officers in the process. A retired town matriarch disappears along with her gardener. A missing child is found alive, buried in a grave that has not be disturbed for many years. A former Special-Forces-soldier-turned-police-investigator and his wife possess a mirror that might be the link to several mysterious disappearances over the past century.

Niceville is a town with many secrets. It is a place that is dwarfed by a humongous cliff which keeps much of the town in it's shadow for a good part of the day. There is a surrounding sinkhole that seems to slowly suck the life out of some.

This story is a thriller more than a mystery. If interested in reading more by this author, AHML has four other of his novels: Sniper's Moon [3], Cuba Strait [4], Cobraville [5], and Black Water Transit [6] - which has been adapted to film. It stars Lawrence Fishburne [7], Carl Urban [8], and Steven Dorff [9]. Stroud won the Arthur Ellis Award in 1993 for best new Canadian novel: Lizardskin [10] - which is available thru LINKin [11].