{"id":305,"date":"2016-11-23T08:42:58","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T14:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/?p=305"},"modified":"2016-11-23T08:42:58","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T14:42:58","slug":"trouble-in-brighton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/trouble-in-brighton\/","title":{"rendered":"Trouble in Brighton"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"latewhitsuncover\"<\/a>Late Whitsun<\/a><\/em>
\nJasper Kent<\/a>
\npaperback $9.99
\nebook $2.99<\/p>\n

I really liked the first three volumes of Jasper Kent’s The Danilov Quintet<\/em>, which I consider to be a\u00a0 thinking man’s vampire hunter. The last two volumes haven’t been published in the US, so I’ve not read them yet.\u00a0 Emphasis on “yet”.\u00a0 You can read my reviews here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With Late Whitsun<\/em>, Kent turns his attention to the historical mystery.\u00a0 Set in Brighton in 1938, the novel concerns Charlie Woolf.\u00a0 He’s a sometimes private investigator who earns a meager living by making sketches for the tourists.<\/p>\n

When he’s approached by his former partner, Alan O’Connor, and asked to act as a courier, it’s a chance to earn some easy money.\u00a0 All he has to do is take an envelope to London and give it to a man by a certain bench in a certain park at a certain time.<\/p>\n

Of course it’s not that easy.\u00a0 The envelope contains incriminating photos.\u00a0 The man he meets is wearing a gas mask.\u00a0 And when Charlie returns home, there’s a surprise waiting for him in his apartment.<\/p>\n

And those are all of the details you’re going to get.\u00a0 There are several nice twists in this one.\u00a0 Charlie is an interesting narrator, one whose past and hangups are more hinted at than shown.\u00a0 This makes him intriguing.\u00a0 Kent doesn’t infodump Charlie’s backstory on us, but feeds us tidbits, making us\u00a0 want more.\u00a0 I particularly liked the part where Charlie has a lunch appointment with his mother but has to question a prostitute who is a witness; so he takes her to lunch and lets his mother think she’s his new girlfriend.\u00a0 His mother, or course, wants him to find “a nice girl.”<\/p>\n

I found Late Whitsun<\/em> to be a satisfying mystery.\u00a0 The setting was familiar enough that I didn’t have work too hard to get into it, but it was still exotic enough to be interesting.\u00a0 Brighton, in case you don’t know, is a seaside resort town.\u00a0 (It’s also where Jasper Kent is from, and while I found the amount of detail a good thing, a bit more explanation of the geography for those of us who aren’t familiar with it would have been nice.\u00a0 But I quibble.)<\/p>\n

The spectre of WWII hovered over the book at times.\u00a0 That was one aspect of the gas mask angle, a couple of conversations about a government plan to distribute gas masks to British citizens in the event of war.\u00a0 And the government, or at least the government agent who shows up, expected there to be war.\u00a0 But that wasn’t the only reason for the gas masks.\u00a0 There are others, and not just because meeting a man you don’t know in a park at night to discover he’s wearing a gas mask is just plain creepy (in a good way for the reader, if not the person meeting the man in the gas mask).<\/p>\n

I like a twisty tale, especially one full of mystery.\u00a0 Late Whitsun<\/em> certainly meets that standard.\u00a0 Highly recommended.\u00a0 There are two more novels in this series slated to appear in the near future, and I’m looking forward to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late Whitsun Jasper Kent paperback $9.99 ebook $2.99 I really liked the first three volumes of Jasper Kent’s The Danilov Quintet, which I consider to be a\u00a0 thinking man’s vampire hunter. The last two volumes haven’t been published in the US, so I’ve not read them yet.\u00a0 Emphasis on “yet”.\u00a0 You can read my reviews […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[103,93],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private-investigators","tag-jasper-kent","tag-private-investigators"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3P58L-4V","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions\/309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/adventuresfantastic.com\/gumshoes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}