Customer Reviews

Buffalo Mountain: An Ike Schwartz Mystery (Ike Schwartz Mysteries (Hardcover))

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Picketsville, Virginia Deputy Sheriff Whaite Billingsley finds a body on the nearby icy forests; the driver's license on the dead man was issued to Randal Harris. Since the victim is part of the orneriest bone cruel family living in the most isolated backwater area of Buffalo Mountain, Whaite assumes a feud of sorts.

However, when Whaite's supervisor sheriff Ike Schwartz sees the corpse, he knows the victim is not a Harris, but instead is missing former KGB spy Alexei Kamarov. Using his past contacts as a CIA Agent, Ike contacts government operative Charlie Garland while pursuing the case as a routine homicide starting with sending Whaite to do field inquires and directing Sam Ryder to conduct web searches.

In his third Shenandoah Valley police procedural ( see SECRETS and ARTSCAPE), Ike's behavior seems suspect as he knows better than to tell his subordinates that this whodunit is part of a blacks ops espionage encounter, but does so. The mystery is entertaining as Ike and his crew meets a cast of characters from generations living on the Buffalo Mountain, Russians who are out of place here (Brooklyn is more apropos), and CIA operatives trying to blend in. Although Ike's out of character behavior appears wrong as if he is bragging about war stories, fans of the series will enjoy the case of the former Soviet spy turned dead hillbilly family member.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Narissa Johnson for Reader Views (4/07)

"The body lay face up, halfway in the town's corporate limits, halfway in the state park." This is how Fredrick Ramsay's latest installment of his Ike Schwartz mystery series, "Buffalo Mountain" opens.

The questions surrounding this body discovered halfway between the jurisdiction of Ike Schwartz, the Sheriff of a small town in the Shenandoah Valley, and the state park begin to mount. Schwartz recognizing this body as Alexei Kamarov, a former Russian colleague from his CIA spy days, who Schwartz (and the CIA) assumed was killed years ago.

As members of Schwartz's investigative team attempt to track down the killer of this man, the CIA and FBI enter the picture - one group to request that the true identity of the Russian be hidden and the other launching their own covert investigation into the activities within the small town.

Ramsay's story introduces various characters which fill in the connection between this Russian and a neighboring town with its own closed societies built upon decades of family rivalries. While Schwartz contends with solving the mystery surrounding the dead man, the CIA, FBI and a neighboring town, he also becomes embroiled in the political pressures growing from within the town's women's college and his town's desire to move toward "growth."

What a shame so many interesting parts of a great mystery never really delivered. All the pieces were there: an interesting premise and a collection of characters with varying degrees of complexities and development. But in the end, when the different pieces of the story began to weave together the answers to all the questions the opening sentence prompts, we find a twist. Not the kind of twist that gathers a reader with momentum as they are hurtled toward a climax which answers the questions the reader has. Rather, the twist is how rather ordinary and coincidental all the activity within the story truly is; this time the climax does not live up to the promise of the opening line of "Buffalo Mountain."

Received book free of charge.