Review: "Domino Island" by Desmond Bagley

Domino Island by Desmond Bagley HarperCollins, 2019   Domino Island is Desmond Bagley’s “lost” novel. The manuscript (ms) was discovered by the researcher Philip Eastwood at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center where Bagley’s papers are housed. Along with the ms—titled Because Salton Died—were letters between Bagley and his editor at Collins, Bob Knittel, and handwritten notes on the ms, identifying planned changes for publication, but Bagley pulled Because Salton Died from Collins and the changes were never made. There are a couple hypotheses about why Bagley stopped work on the book. The first and most obvious is Bagley decided it was a hopeless project and there is some evidence supporting this. In the letter to his editor accompanying the ms, Bagley wrote, “I had a bad case of ‘writer’s block’[.]” He had started and abandoned four “standard Bagleys”—adventure thrillers—and he decided to try something entirely new to get his creative energy going. So, in the early days of 1972 he began working on an Agatha Christie-style traditional mystery, or whodunnit, but Bagley wanted to rework the novel into his usual fare because: “My method of writing is singularly ill-adapted for the writing of a whodunnit. I begin with a situation and let it develop, and the plot follows where the development leads; whereas a whodunnit should be meticulously worked out in a synopsis before a key on the typewriter is touched.” The second hypothesis—and my favorite of the two—involves the film, The Mackintosh Man, which was based on Bagley’s 1972 novel, The Freedom Trap. Doubleday, Bagley’s American publisher, wanted a novel like The Freedom Trap that could be marketed in tandem with the film’s release in 1973. Bagley’s next novel, The Tightrope Men (1973), seemed to oblige this request since it is similar in theme to The Freedom Trap. But both thoughts are purely conjecture since, as far as I know, no one has uncovered any direct evidence to support one theory over the other for Bagley’s motive for ditching Because Salton Died in favor of writing The Tightrope Men. Now on to the review: Bill Kemp, a former Royal Army officer, is a highly competent and well-paid insurance consultant working for Western and Continental Insurance Co. Kemp is sent to the Caribbean Island nation, and former British colony, Campanilla, to investigate the death of the well-heeled David Salton. Salton’s decomposing corpse was discovered in a small boat off Campanilla’s coast, and the local coroner ruled the cause of death as a heart attack. Kemp’s investigation is supposed to be nothing more than a simple “check-the-box” operation, but things start unwinding when he arrives on the island. According to a police captain, Kemp’s body was too far gone for a cause of death to be determined. And Salton had enemies everywhere. He was involved in island politics, and he’d been railing against the island casinos—rumored to be owned by an organized crime syndicate—the banking industry, which specialized in moving money discreetly for wealthy clients without paying much local tax, and the current and very corrupt government. Domino Island’s origins as a whodunnit are visible in the finished book. The mysterious death of David Salton. The wide spectrum of suspects. Kemp’s observations of the police’s inadequate original investigation and his developing and then discarding of suspects and murder theories. But the climactic resolution of the mystery is far from traditional—although a portion is set in something like a drawing room—with a bunch of action and a conclusion that would be difficult for any reader to guess because there simply aren’t adequate clues in the narrative. Which is okay, because Domino Island works well as an adventure thriller through its exotic location, bullet-flying action, and Kemp’s tough guy persona. Domino Island isn’t Bagley’s best, but it’s a welcome addition for any of Bagley’s regular readers. *                   *                   * This is a slightly updated version of a review published on Feb. 17, 2022.

a little more about Domino Island…   After Because Salton Died was found, Bagley’s literary estate allowed the screenwriter Michael Davies to make the changes identified in the manuscript notes and from the correspondence between Bagley and Knittel and Domino Island was born. According to Philip Eastwood’s Afterword, Bagley’s “typescript, of approximately 89,000 words, bore on its title page: NEW NOVEL BECAUSE SALTON DIED (if you think of a better, please do) And more than 47 years after it was written, the publisher did find a better title with Domino Island. *                   *                   * Check out Amazon’s page for Domino Island  For more information about Desmond Bagley and his work, check out The Complete Desmond Bagley at Amazon

 

Review: "Front Sight: Three Swagger Novellas" by Stephen Hunter

 

Front Sight Three Swagger Novellas by Stephen Hunter Atria Books, 2024     I read Stephen Hunter’s first Bob Lee Swagger thriller, Point of Impact (1993), sometime during the Spring of 1994. And holy wow, it knocked me off my feet with its disturbingly realistic violence—the realism due as much to the emotional impact on the characters as the action itself—and the dizzying large screen conspiracy plot with a former Vietnam sniper, turned Arkansas drunk, nicknamed Bob the Nailer, at its core. I read the next two—Black Light (1996) and Time to Hunt (1998)—as they were released with the same satisfying awe as I’d had while reading the first. Frankly, all three are among the best thrillers published in the 1990s. After that, Hunter switched to telling the story of Bob Lee’s father, Earl. A rugged former Marine and legendary Arkansas lawman gunned down in 1954 by the nasty Lamar Pye—you should read the fantastic Dirty White Boys (1994) for Lamar’s tale. Hot Springs, which was the first of three books featuring Earl—the other two are Pale Horse Coming (2001) and Havana (2003)—hit bookstores in 2000. And then in 2007 Hunter returned to Bob Lee with the disappointing The 47th Samurai and again in 2008 with the so-so Night of Thunder. Which is when I lost interest in Hunter’s new releases and the Swaggers both. I mention all this because I recently read Hunter’s Front Sight (2024), a collection of three Swagger novellas—one each for Earl and Bob Lee, and another featuring Bob Lee’s grandad, Charles Swagger—and found myself wondering if I’d been too hasty in writing-off Hunter and the Swaggers. The first, “City of Meat,” featuring Charles Swagger, is a hard-as-nails story about an elusive drug syndicate working Chicago’s predominately Black 7th District in 1934. Charles is a former Arkansas sheriff and renowned gunfighter turned G-Man on an FBI team looking for the notorious bank robber, Baby Face Nelson. While investigating a possible sighting of Nelson at the Chicago Stockyards, Charles is confronted by a knife-wielding man soaring high on an unknown narcotic. Charles teams-up with the real-life depression-era Black lawman, Slyvester Washington, nicknamed Two-Gun Pete—rumored to be the source material for “Dirty Harry” Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies—and follows the trail of the narcotics gang into unexpected places. “City of Meat” is action-packed and violent, but its real-world setting, the plight of Blacks on Chicago’s Southside—nobody really cared what happened there so long as it stayed there—give it a panache and a depth unusual for anything published in the thriller category. As Hunter says in his intro, “City of Meat” is his attempt at writing the equivalent of “the message picture,” where the story is accompanied by a portrayal of a societal ill. And it worked well. “Johnny Tuesday,” which began life as an unproduced screenplay, is a hardboiled film noir in novella format. It is hardboiled in a Carroll John Daly way: fast-paced but at times frustratingly indecipherable with a black and white morality and, especially in the case of Earl, cartoonish characters. It’s 1945 and Earl Swagger is fresh from the South Pacific and now fighting a personal war in the small fictional city of Chesterfield, Maryland. He hits town using the name Johnny Tuesday to investigate a lethal bank robbery and finds pretty much everyone in town is a scoundrel. The style of this one is cool—it feels like one of those “complete novel” tales published in the pulps of the 1930s. A category I like, but the writing (as good as it is) felt a little too self-aware and the plot a little too busy. And even worse, Earl seemed like an altogether different man than he is in his novels. “Johnny Tuesday” would have worked better if the hero hadn’t been Earl Swagger, or if I hadn’t read any of Hunter’s excellent Earl Swagger novels before reading it. “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” which is my favorite of the stories, is a serial killer tale set in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It’s 1979 and Bob Lee is drowning his dark Vietnam memories—“whiskey dreams were the best, and this one was fine”—in his tiny Polk County, Arkansas trailer. But his slow suicide gets shunted aside when his old friend Sam Vincent comes asking for a favor. A killer is targeting young transient women working Hot Springs’ sex trade and the local force is out of ideas of how to catch the monster. They won’t go to the staties or the FBI because it would bring unwanted publicity as Hot Springs is trying to transition from a rough and tumble crime town into a family destination resort. And everyone is sure Bob Lee can bring something new to the investigation since he comes from lawman stock. And, of course, they’re right. In Hunter’s intro to “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” he says it is his attempt at writing a “notorious genre of bloody Italian mystery-horror films of the seventies,” called “Giallo.” A film style I’m unfamiliar with, but if any of the films are as good as this tale, I need to make amends and get acquainted with it quick-like. Besides the great title, “Five Dolls of the Gut Hook,” has that grand dusty feeling of the 1970s: pickup trucks, sweat, cowboy shirts, brutality, dark deeds, and corrupt cops all wrapped into a honky-tonk town darkened by its many secrets. And there’s Bob Lee, being Bob Lee, too. This one alone is worth the price of admission.

Check out Front Sight on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "Ceylon Sapphires" by Mailan Doquang

 

Ceylon Sapphires by Mailan Doquang Mysterious Press, 2025   Mailan Doquang’s second novel, Ceylon Sapphires—which, conveniently, is also the second in her Rune Sarasin thriller series—is sharp-witted, scorchingly paced, and down-right thrilling. Rune is a likable rogue with a bottomless debt to the nasty and ruthless Charles Lemaire. While Rune was working Bangkok as a jewel thief, she had the misfortune of stealing from Lemaire and now, at the threat of the only two people she loves, Rune is Lemaire’s peon. Whatever Lemaire wants stolen, Rune steals. While Napoleon Boneparte’s great-great-grand niece, Margot Steiner, is taking a private showing of the great man’s portrait in the Louvre, Rune (at the behest of Lemaire) executes a magician-like caper to steal the valuable Ceylon sapphire necklace—commissioned by the little emperor himself—from around Steiner’s neck. Rune’s dazzling misdirection and sleight-of-hand earns her the necklace. But when Rune is ordered to steal the well-guarded matching earrings, she knows Lemaire will never let her go. So Rune does the only thing she can. She makes plans to steal the earrings while at the same time plotting to get free of Lemaire. Ceylon Sapphires is a globe-trotting thriller—the action moves from Paris to Mallorca, Marseille, Amsterdam, and Berlin—with a solid plot held together by Rune’s vulnerability and flawed likability. A handful of surprises, a few gritty and realistic jewelry capers, and a couple monstrous villains keep things interesting. Lemaire’s role is mostly off-page, but his villainy is omnipresent and pushes Rune into deadlier and deadlier situations. The story flies with a sizzling pace and an easy-to-read narrative style. And, this is no easy feat in any thriller, the European settings are nicely rendered and believable. Ceylon Sapphaires is how a thriller should read, from the first page to the last, and when it was done, I was tempted to start again from the beginning. *                 *                 * Ceylon Sapphires picks up where the first Rune Sarasin novel, Blood Rubies (2024), ended, but it isn’t necessary to have read the previous book to enjoy it. But why not read Blood Rubies anyway?

Check out Ceylon Sapphires—which is scheduled for release June 3, 2025—on Amazon: click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Review: "Bad Moon" by Todd Ritter

 

Bad Moon by Todd Ritter Minotaur Books, 2011   Bad Moon—which is the second of three mysteries featuring Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, police chief, Kat Campbell—is a white-knuckle ride loaded with twists and thrills and unsuspected revelations. When Nick Donnelly, a homicide investigator for the State Police before being drummed out after an injury, calls Kat hoping for her help on a cold case his Foundation was hired to solve. On July 20, 1969, the same day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, ten-year-old Charlie Olmstead went missing from his home. Charlie’s bicycle was found in the water just above Sunset Falls and the police, led by Kat’s father, Jim, ruled his death an accident. But Charlie’s body was never found and his mother, Maggie, believed her son was kidnapped and may still be alive. While on her death bed, Maggie made her only other child, the bestselling novelist Eric Olmstead, promise to find Charlie. So Eric, back in Perry Hollow to bury his mother, hired Nick and with Kat’s unofficial help—after all, the case was closed more than 40-years ago—the trio follow the scant clues into a shocking web of murder. Bad Moon is lightning paced and teeters on the edge of psychological thriller; which makes sense because Todd Ritter has since gained fame for the twisty psychological thrillers he writes as Riley Sager. Ritter litters, in a good way, the narrative with conflicting personal motivations and shades of character compromise. Kat is compromised by her deceased father’s involvement in the case and a relationship she had with Eric as a teenager. Nick’s conflict is with his injury and a grudge he holds against the State Police for his ignominious termination. And Eric is crippled with guilt for leaving his mother alone for so many decades. But it is the plot that matters most because everything else is subterfuge to keep the climactic reveals hidden until they pop onto the page. And oh boy, does it work.

Bad Moon is currently out-of-print, which is a shame because I had a really good time reading it—and if you enjoy an occasional twisted and surprising thriller, where the plot surpasses everything, you likely will too. And don’t worry about reading the series in order because I didn’t have any trouble following Bad Moon, which was my first experience with Kat Campbell and Todd Ritter.

Review: "The Mailman" by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

 

The Mailman by Andrew Welsh-Huggins Mysterious Press, 2025     The Mailman, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins—best known as the author of the seven books in the Andy Hayes, P.I. series—is a peddle-to-the-metal thriller with a nod to Jack Reacher but with a wholly original character in freelance deliveryman, Mercury Carter. While delivering a package to attorney Rachel Stanfield, Merc finds Rachel and her husband, Glenn, being questioned, tortured really, by four men looking for Stella Wolford, the complainant in a seemingly meaningless wrongful termination lawsuit against Rachel’s corporate client. Rachel hasn’t seen Stella since her deposition weeks earlier, and Rachel has no idea where Stella lives. But the men, led by the menacing Finn, are determined that Rachel can tell them where Stella is hiding. Merc reacts quickly—and very un-deliveryman-like—and incapacitates two of the men before Finn stands Merc down by threatening Rachel and Glenn. Finn, with his entourage, leaves Merc and Glenn behind and takes Rachel as a hostage. With Glenn in tow, and a hunch Finn is going after Glenn’s daughter at a Chicago boarding school, Merc goes after the kidnappers with a single verbalized goal: his night won’t be over until the package is delivered to Rachel. The Mailman is a multi-layered chase thriller—there are a bunch of moving parts that are handled marvelously by Welsh-Huggins—with a handful of surprises and a likable, if somewhat stiff, hero. Merc’s backstory, including his motivation to help people, is told in short and interesting snippets in the first half of the narrative. The action moves across the Midwest, from Indianapolis to Chicago and places in-between, without much importance of the where—instead it is the what and the why of the villains’ activities (and Merc’s reaction to them) that give the tale interest. The Mailman is a nail-biting escapist thriller with twists and whirls and everything else the genre promises. It’s damn fun, too.

Check out The Mailman  on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Review: "Pro Bono" by Thomas Perry

 

Pro Bono by Thomas Perry Mysterious Press, 2025   Pro Bono, by Thomas Perry, is a lightning fast, surprising, and uniquely structured—there are two separate plotlines with one acting as a catalyst for the other, but otherwise never converging—chase thriller. Vesper Ellis, a beautiful, young, and wealthy widow, enters the law office of Charles Warren with concerns that someone is embezzling the investment accounts her late husband had managed. Since his death a few years earlier, Vesper hasn’t done anything with the accounts other than place the quarterly statements in their respective folders. But lately she has noticed the accounts seem to be stagnant even as the market is going up. Warren, who has his own experience with fraudsters, takes the case seriously and when Vesper disappears shortly after leaving his office he reacts as if something nefarious has happened. He contacts the client who referred Vesper to him, any other of her friends he can find, and finally the police. In the background, an old heartbreak of his mother’s resurfaces, also involving financial fraud, which is only tangentially related to Vesper’s plight but plays a large part of the story anyway. Pro Bono is vintage Perry: the plotting is swift, the action is fast, and the pages seem to burn in the reader’s hands. Much of the background plot (or the catalyst plot) is used to build Warren’s motivation for helping Vesper—a widow being defrauded by bad actors, which is exactly what happened to his mother. But it is more than that and it plays out in a surprising and dangerous way. Pro Bono is far from Perry’s best. The separate plotlines are both interesting, but I had hoped the two would converge in a satisfying way, and both are dependent on coincidence. If you’ve never read Perry before, I would suggest starting elsewhere in his backlist, but if you’re already a fan—you’ll like this one, too.

Check out Pro Bono on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Review: "Breaking Cover" by J. D. Rhoades

 

Breaking Cover J. D. Rhoades Minotaur Books, 2008     Breaking Cover is a supercharged, violent thriller, and as entertaining as the genre gets. Undercover F.B.I. agent, Tony Wolf, went underground four years ago after his assignment with a ruthless biker gang, known as the Brotherhood, went sideways. On the run, and unsure who he can trust—including some of his fellow F.B.I. agents—Wolf finds a hidey-hole in the small, picturesque town of Pine Lake, North Carolina. But Wolf blows his cover when he rescues two brothers from their kidnapper after seeing one of them in the window of a van. An F.B.I. agent recognizes Wolf from a gas station security camera, which rings more than a few bells in Washington. Then a tenacious local tv reporter captures Wolf on film—and identifies him as a possible conspirator in the boys’ kidnapping. When Wolf’s image hits the national media, it brings the Brotherhood to Pine Lake looking for a very rough kind of justice. Breaking Cover, which was originally advertised as a standalone, is the first of two thrillers featuring Tony Wolf. The second is Broken Shield (2013). I haven’t read that second book—in fact, Breaking Cover is my first experience with Rhoades’s writing. But man, it won’t be my last. The breakneck pacing, the sleek, literate, and hardboiled style give it sizzle. There are gunfights, explosions, hidden tunnels, a hard-as-nails deputy Sheriff, and Wolf’s wife—who figured her husband had been dead for the last four years. But it’s the vileness of the Brotherhood with their irrational hatred of Wolf and a penchant for dispatching its enemies with the grotesque Blood Eagle, and Wolf’s paranoia that keeps him running and gunning that give Breaking Cover pop.

Find Breaking Cover on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

Review: "Safe Enough and Other Stories" by Lee Child

 

Safe Enough and Other Stories by Lee Child Mysterious Press, 2024   Lee Child is best known as the creator of Jack Reacher, which makes sense because estimates place the number of books sold north of 200-million. This, along with a couple big budget Hollywood movies and a hit television series, have made Reacher a pop-culture icon. But—and many of you will disagree with me here—my favorite of Lee Child’s writing are his standalone short stories. I like them because they showcase Child’s craft, the precise plotting, and the subtle and ironic humor without the built-in expectations of a series character. All of this is why Child’s new collection, Safe Enough and Other Stories, featuring 20 of his standalone tales, made me happy when it crossed my desk. The stories, published between 2004 and 2020, are easily categorized as mystery and thriller and there is nary a dud in the pack. “The Greatest Trick of All” is a wicked-ironic take on an altogether too greedy hitman. The titular, “Safe Enough,” is a smashing story about murder and betrayal, but it ranges far from the expected and it left this reader with a smile. “The .50 Solution” is another hitman job but this time the surprise is—well, it’s better left unsaid, but it is a surprising, if somewhat violent, solution. “Me and Mr. Rafferty” is a cockeyed serial killer tale about the symbiotic relationship between detective and deviant. “Addicted to Sweetness” is about drugs and murder and, ultimately, just rewards (of a sort). “My First Drug Trial” is a clever take on marijuana use and laws in the United States. It felt just about right, too, with the added benefit of being fun. “New Blank Document,” which is the most serious story in the collection, is about racism and secrets. And my favorite story, “Normal in Every Way,” is about a brilliant but awkward policeman relegated to file clerk duty in the San Francisco of the 1950s. He was the police department’s database before everything was moved into the ether, but did he get any of the credit? Safe Enough and Other Stories is the kind of collection that reads easy. Most readers will devour its stories in a few sittings and enjoy every second of it, but don’t take my word—read it yourself.

Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the hardcover at Amazon.

Review: "An Honorable Assassin" by Steve Hamilton

 

An Honorable Assassin by Steve Hamilton Blackstone, 2024   Steve Hamilton is best known for his series featuring former Detroit cop turned reluctant Upper Peninsula private eye, Alex McKnight. McKnight appeared in eleven novels between 1999 and 2018. The first, A Cold Day in Paradise—which I heartily recommend—netted Hamilton an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The McKnight books are meaty, well-plotted, character-driven extravaganzas, but they never attracted many readers outside the P.I. genre. Which is a shame because they are as good as anything the mystery genre has to offer. In 2016, Hamilton changed course and released a crime thriller, The Second Life of Nick Mason, to great fanfare. It made multiple best-of-year lists, including from NPR and Kirkus Reviews and, perhaps most telling, it landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Second Life of Nick Mason combined a rich Chicago setting with solid characterization and an intricate (and surprising) plot. It, frankly, surpassed most thrillers of its kind on every level. Hamilton followed it up with the second Nick Mason book, Exit Strategy, in 2017, then in 2018 released an oddball Alex McKnight book—odd because, unlike the other McKnight books, it alternates between first and third person and is told from multiple character perspectives—titled Dead Man Running. Since then, other than a co-authored novel with Janet Evanovich, Steve Hamilton has been silent. At least until now, because his third Nick Mason title, An Honorable Assassin, is scheduled for release tomorrow (Aug. 27). The Second Life of Nick Mason opened with Mason being released from a 25-years-to-life sentence, for a truck heist gone wrong, after serving only five years. Part of the deal is Mason must work as an assassin for a Chicago gangster named Darius Cole; the guy who arranged for Mason’s release. Those first two books are about Mason’s struggle to break free from Cole and now in An Honorable Assassin, after he has finally escaped Cole, he finds himself bound to a mysterious and sinister international cartel. An Honorable Assassin begins only hours after Exit Strategy ends. Mason is sent to the world’s second largest city, Jakarta, Indonesia, without any instructions except that he’ll be met at the airport. When he arrives in Jakarta, even before he has left the airport, Mason’s first assignment is dished out—assassinate a wealthy terrorist sponsor named Hasham Baya as he arrives on a skyscraper’s helipad. Everything goes wrong: Baya escapes, the building is overrun by Indonesia’s paramilitary unit, Detachement-88, and Mason is arrested. The mission planning seems non-existent to Mason and, even worse, before he can get out of police custody a French Interpol agent, Martin Sauvage, takes an interest in him. Unlike Hamilton’s first two Nick Mason novels, which are a marvelous marriage of the crime and the thriller genres, An Honorable Assassin is a straight-line rocket propelled thriller. It is closer to Lee Child and David Baldacci than what we are used to seeing from Hamilton, but the electric style and frenetic pacing keep the pages turning and the reader from wandering into the improbabilities of the plot. A step below the first two books in the series, An Honorable Assassin is still a bunch of fun and very much worth reading.

Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the paperback at Amazon.

Review: "Journey" by Catherine Arnold (Harrison Arnston?)

 

Journey by Catherine Arnold (Harrison Arnston?) iUniverse, 2003     In the early-1990s my parents sprang for a subscription to the bulletin board service Prodigy. Prodigy was a predecessor to AOL and (ultimately) to the commercialized internet we have today. Basically, Prodigy was a bunch of bulletin boards where people with similar interests gathered to chat about what made them excited. I tended to spend my time—or perhaps misspend my time—on boards about books and baseball. One of the boards I frequented was called Harry’s Bar & Grill. Its operator was a thriller writer named Harrison Arnston. He went by Harry in both the real and digital worlds, but his novels were published as “Harrison”. Harry was a renaissance man—cool, successful, and kind. His board was about writing and he knew what he was talking about. When I first met Harry—the digital version anyway—he had published four novels; all paperback originals released by Zebra. In 1984, Harry had sold his successful California “auto-accessory company,” moved to Palm Harbor, Florida, and set out to write thrillers. It didn’t come easy, either. After reading his first thriller, which was never published, one agent told him to find another hobby. But Harry wrote another and then another before he found print with Zebra. Harry was the first “real” writer that took an interest in me, or at least made me feel like he did, and I loved every piece of advice he gave me and anyone else that wandered into Harry’s Bar & Grill. In the early-1990s, HarperPaperbacks became Harry’s publisher and the quality if his work noticeably improved. Jon L. Breen noted that Harry’s legal thriller, Act of Passion (1991), was “unusually well plotted” and every book Harry wrote was better than the last. Harry’s journey ended prematurely in 1996, he was 59, after a brief battle with lung cancer, but I’ve always wondered what he would have produced if he hadn’t died. My point? I think I found Harrison Arnston’s final novel. It was self-published by Arnston’s widow, Theresa Sandford-Arnston, using her pseudonym, Catherine Arnold, with the title, Journey. Unfortunately, Ms. Arnston died in 2016 and so I can’t ask her. I haven’t been able to make contact with any of his or her family, either. And I’ve tried. But after reading Journey—which is a cool take on an X-Files theme—I’m convinced it was written by Harry Arnston because it is stylistically similar to his last few published novels. Another clue, and it is a big one, comes from Harry’s St. Petersburg Times obituary (Feb. 4, 1996) stating his agent was peddling a novel titled Journey. My only hesitation about Journey belonging to Harry Arnston is, back in 2008 I exchanged emails—at least three or four—with Theresa Arnston about Harry and she said his only unpublished book was a thriller titled American Terrorist. Journey had been published five years earlier, but I’m puzzled why she wouldn’t have told me about Journey. Now, a little about Journey. It was obviously written in the mid-1990s because it mentions the first World Trade Center bombing and the Waco siege (both in 1993), and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, but nothing significant after that. There are a few add-ins, a line here or there that feel like they were dropped in by another writer and don’t exactly fit the overall context. One such add-in is a mention of the 2002 film, The Hours. Journey has that big 1990s thriller feel, too—weighty problems, significant background detail, lightweight characterization, but still richer than most current genre thrillers, and a quality of we can do it hopefulness that we seemed to lose after 9/11. Everything begins when a 747 disappears from an air traffic controller’s radar screen. There is no evidence the airliner crashed, changed course, or exploded. It simply disappeared. The investigation is handed to the FBI, but—against all protocols—the Pentagon assumes control with the blessing of the Department of Justice’s top suits. A development that irks the FBI’s top investigator, Jack Kalman, enough that he takes leave and starts his own investigation. There is a bunch of detail about how air traffic control worked in the 1990s, including the ramifications of when Ronald Reagan broke the union in the 1980s. The action is swift and—especially the first two-thirds while the happening is a still a mystery—intriguing. There are several repetitive passages, but none are overly long, and I bet if this had been published in Arnston’s lifetime they would have been fixed. A strange prologue—strange because it was obviously written by another writer—is attached with little relevance to the narrative and there are a few odd typos in the text. Odd, because it seems like the wrong word was used. But overall, Journey, is an attractive, high-speed, flight that would have been even better if it had been published when it Harry Arnston wrote it. Click here for the Kindle edition or here for the paperback at Amazon.

I wrote a biographical article about Harrison Arnston a few years ago—which you can read here.