Customer Reviews

Book Case

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This is another mystery by the wonderfully literate Stephen Greenleaf. It is a mystery about a manuscript that turns up on a publisher's desk. Is it fiction or truth. Its a "book case". Get it?

The manuscript is about a teacher at a prestigious Bay area prep school who is framed. He is accused of molesting a student and spends several years in jail. He is innocent and the book manuscript tells of the particulars of his frame-up and how he will take revenge. Tanner is hired to find the author of the manuscript and discover whether the manuscript is truth or fiction.

This is a book within a book. It is very clever and a fun page-turner as are all Greenleaf mysteries.

The first most noticeable thing about this book is the excessive use of alliteration, especially at the very beginning. And I mean excessive. At least two three or four word stretches with the same consonant sounds, per sentence for the beginning paragraphs. After that it seemed to taper off but I still noticed it cropping up from time to time.

Moving on.

I picked this up from my local Half-Price Books because it had an intriguing cover (which has not even a remote resemblance to the story) and because it had an "Autographed Copy" sticker.

It was an entertaining read. It kept me reading to the very end to find out what happened, although that is really a genre-trait of mysteries. The premise didn't quite stand up. It is about a publisher who receives an unsigned manuscript on his desk of a novel so extraordinary and cataclysmic that it is bound to be an instant best seller, yet it works on different intellectual levels, and blah blah blah. The problem is that this earth-shattering manuscript is not left as some vague idea in our minds. Instead excerpts from it preface every chapter and are sprinkled throughout the book in other places as well. Enough excerpts to tell that this would be an exceedingly boring, heavy-on-the-expository, self-indulgent thing that would hardly hold your interest all the way through much less skyrocket to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List.

That complaint aside, it was a fine mystery. I didn't see the ending coming the way it was eventually laid out. I also think several of the plot twists were not fully supported, but I've certainly read worse.

John Marshall Tanner is the likeable protagonist in this entertaining book. Tanner is a former lawyer who operates in a laid back fashion and is a private detective mostly by default.BOOK CASE is about fraud and murder. It also deals with the way in which some people can get ensnared by the lure of an elite private school.