My latest book, The Bluegrass Devils of Detroit, is now available on Amazon. I’ll have more to say about it here shortly, but for now I’d just like to share the review it received from IndieReader.
Title: THE BLUEGRASS DEVILS OF DETROIT
Author: Chuck Snearly
Genre: Mystery/Suspense/Thriller
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
A reticent Michigan history professor joins a PI in search of answers about a decades-old cold case that may lead to valuable treasure.
When history professor Andrew Pickens is approached by a private detective after a lecture on the Detroit mafia, he refuses the call to adventure. Investigating the 1933 disappearance of a man who vanished after being the last person to see his friend killed by a white supremacist militia member is just too dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that the PI, Murphy, is nursing a gunshot wound. But Pickens’s love for his city’s rich history of crime lures him into Murphy’s world, where he and his client (grandson of the long-missing victim, law professor Baxter Fineman) contend with digging into archives, being followed into graveyards at night, and scarcely avoiding shootouts with a violent cultish gang called the Black Legion. Traveling from Hell to Paradise (both real towns in the state of Michigan), Pickens, Murphy, and Fineman team up to solve the decades-old cold case—and search for Fineman’s grandfather’s supposed buried treasure—in Chuck Snearly’s entertaining mystery novel THE BLUEGRASS DEVILS OF DETROIT.
Pickens’s repeated refusal to help Murphy and Fineman becomes the book’s running gag, as he continues to help them despite his reservations. Humor that plays with the reader’s expectations is common throughout the book, as when Murphy tries to distract Pickens with pun-filled jokes to disarm him from his anxiety when he’s trapped in a well—instead of simply hurrying to pull him out. Most of the humor works well, but the jokes sometimes fall flat when they feel self-serving, as when Pickens’s students laugh at his attempts at humor during a lecture while readers may not be laughing.
The book’s humor is a jolly balance to its thrilling tension, which comes in the form of both high-stakes violence and slow-burn suspense. Murphy delaying his rescue of Pickens from the well, for instance, is made all the more suspenseful with the knowledge that an aggressive antagonist is moments away from arriving on the scene, armed and dangerous. It’s a race to find invaluable hidden treasure: fanatic Black Legion members versus the team of PI and professors. The novel’s quick pace ups suspense; even during long drives from Detroit to Michigan’s upper peninsula, peeks into the antagonists’ perspective and character banter keep tensions high. Pickens relays information on Detroit’s criminal history to Murphy and Fineman as needed, which offers context for Fineman’s grandfather’s disappearance and the white supremacist Black Legion’s activities. It also helps round out the book’s setting.
Also maintaining the book’s suspense are the likable, realistic characters. When the trio finds letters that Fineman’s grandfather wrote to his pregnant wife, they emphasize how important it is that Fineman, Murphy, and Pickens find the treasure before the Black Legion does. It’s not just potentially valuable, but it’s also sentimental. Sharp descriptions bring characters to life, as when “Murphy was seated in his favorite spot in the Old Miami lounge, an ancient overstuffed chair as stained and smelly as he was.” As the book’s primary point-of-view character, Pickens is the most likable and fully dimensional. He is not only reticent to join the dangerous investigation at first, but he is also hesitant to pursue a love life post-divorce and sign up his casual yet talented garage band for local gigs. Over the course of the novel, though, he learns an important lesson: that “if you fought against evil you might lose, but if you didn’t fight you definitely would lose.”
IR Verdict: Humorous and thrilling in turn, THE BLUEGRASS DEVILS OF DETROIT by Chuck Snearly is a high-stakes mystery thriller with a likable everyman protagonist and local Michigan flavor.
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