Customer Reviews

The Fugitive King (Worldwide Library Mysteries)

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I picked up this book to pass a few minutes, and wound up unable to put it down. The characters were varied and well-presented allowing them to all fit comfortably into the story. The setting, the Blue Ridge Mountains, is an area full of legends and stories that boosted the storyline. All in all, I read it in one day and wish I had another in the series to start right now. It's one of those books where the characters are so well-done you don't want to lose touch with them.

Simon Shaw has achieved some notoriety as a "forensic historian"; that is, a history professor who has a knack for solving really, really cold murder cases by examining them from a historian's perspective. Now a convicted murderer who has read about Simon escapes from prison and takes Simon hostage. He demands that Simon investigate the decades-old murder for which he is serving a life sentence. He did confess, the convict says, but the confession was beaten out of him.

After this exciting opening, Simon manages to get the guy to give himself up. Nothing much happens for the next 70 pages or so as Simon half-heartedly looks into the matter while dealing with his shaky relationship with his non-committal girlfriend, Julia, and his university students desperate for passing grades. But after reading some old newspapers and talking to a couple of people, he decides something about the 1958 murder is out of whack. And since it took place near his hometown of Boone, North Carolina, and since he needs to get away for a while, the old murder is a perfect excuse to pay a visit to his relatives.

The plot doesn't really get rolling until about halfway through the book, but it didn't seem to matter too much. The characters are engaging and amusing, Simon is likable and very human, and the novel has a sharp sense of place that makes me homesick for my mother's cooking. The family relationships have a ring of truth to them that makes this book a fun read, and the solution to the mystery was satisfying and clever without being outlandish.

Over forty years ago in the North Carolina Mountain town of Boone, Roy Freedman was courting his landlord's daughter Eva Porter. When he proposed to her, she refused saying her parents would disown her if she married a Mulingeon. Roy was arrested after the family found a lot of blood in the area where Eva was last seen.

Roy confessed to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison. He was in a minimum-security prison, had a lot of privileges and even worked in the governor's mansion. Roy risked everything he had by walking out of the mansion and holding Professor Simon Shaw at gunpoint. He tells the professor he was forced to confess and wants Simon to find out what really happened to his beloved Eva. Despite his doubts, Simon is drawn into the man's story and after Roy surrenders to the law, the professor decides to find out what really happened forty years ago.

THE FUGITIVE KING is a delightful amateur sleuth novel though why Roy chose the professor rather than a pro remains questionable. Still the engaging tale stars a lovable protagonist who is very much in touch with his feelings. His sensitivity is the reason he decides to help out a man who held him at gunpoint. The support cast consists of a bunch of amiable eccentrics, the kind of people who live in a rough and ready mountain town.

Harriet Klausner

I picked this up on a whim, adding it to my "jelly bean" (quick, fast, mindless) collection for the beach. Frankly, I wasn't expecting much, especially when I realized after the first chapter that the book cover description contained major inaccuracies, as did one of the official reviews here at Amazon. If the editing was that bad on the blurbs, how bad was the book itself? I also vaguely recalled that "Snipe Hunt" had been a so-so read from some years back.

Instead, this turned out to be a well written, very well researched little story with interesting characters, not nauseatingly cozy, and generally a good read. The plot is not predictable, the humor is light (yet occassionally scathing) and the characters are neither flat nor over-the-top. Fans of Sharon McCrumb's NC books and Margaret Maron's Debra Knox ("Bootlegger's Daughter") will like this book.

Shaber manages to interlace some history without being pendantic, contrived or annoying (as in those Anne Perry books explaining Victorian life). The back story about Melungeons is fascinating.

Shaber also knows her North Carolinians. The jab at the owner of the Mercedes SUV (from Charlotte, where else? What other kind of idiot takes a Mercedes off-roading?) who was upset that there was a scratch on his finish will amuse anyone who's ever spent time in a mountain town in NC during the summer season.

A great read for the beach, and especially, the mountains. And no follow-up guilt over allowing your brain to rot during vacation!

I read it and never laughed out loud as I have at some cozy books, but I sure did smile a lot. Simon is a likeable fellow and it was a great book.

Sarah Shaber shows steady improvement as she follows her diminutive detective, "forensic historian" Simon Shaw, around the more scenic parts of North Carolina. Simon, a professor at tiny (and fictional) "Kenan College," is recruited by a convict to clear his name after new evidence -- a 48-year-old pickup with a skeleton inside -- turns up on a mountainside not far from Grandfather Mountain.
Ms. Shaber is no P.D. James, but she leads Simon briskly through the case with colorful, non-stereotypical mountain characters and enough clues and red herrings to challenge a mystery fan. (The title refers to a taxing tactical problem in checkers, for all of you who thought it was a kids'' game.) Her background sketches of Raleigh and picturesque Boone, N.C., are intriguing and accurate. It's enough to inspire a drive (though maybe not at hike) along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I listened to this with the Kindle male robot (for whom I must certainly find a name since we are in such frequent interaction). The hero was a nice sort of down-home guy, a college professor with a small town North Carolina background. He is the son of a Jewish mother and Baptist Father, both deceased, retaining close, but not frequent, ties with both sides of the family. The meat of this story involves events centering in the latter's vicinity. He is divorced, but a soft touch, as shown by the fact that he give his wife ten thousand dollars when she requests, it at the beginning of the story. This in spite of it being five years since they split up and legally he owes her nothing. He is devoted to a women with whom he has been intimate for some years but has absent-mindedly kept her waiting at his doorstep when she comes to spend the week-end with him, another opening event in the book.
He becomes involved with the case of an escaped prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment without parole who has already served forty years, The circumstances under which he agrees to look into the matter are unusual (not to be revealed here) but, being a soft touch, he returns to his home community in which the crime had been committed.
The book is well-plotted, the characters sufficiently idiosyncratic to be interesting, and the writing (as heard not read professional. A good read, more character and puzzler than violent. Should entertain most readers who do not require the suspenseful, action filled, thriller

I've read the first three books in the series and look forward to the last two. I like "cold case" mysteries and am a history/genealogy buff, so the Simon Shaw books are a real pleasure to read. I'm also a Southerner (Mississippi) and can relate very well to the characters and the culture depicted in the books.

I have a particular interest in the role that DNA testing has played in finding Jewish groups in unexpected places. This mystery novel claims that the Appalachian ethnic group known as Melungeons are actually Portuguese Jews and that this has been established by DNA testing. I would love to see this documented.

The mystery case was interesting because there was both a Melungeon aspect and a Cherokee aspect mixed together with more typical mystery elements such as greed and a struggle over land.

I picked up this book to pass a few minutes, and wound up unable to put it down. The characters were varied and well-presented allowing them to all fit comfortably into the story. The setting, the Blue Ridge Mountains, is an area full of legends and stories that boosted the storyline. All in all, I read it in one day and wish I had another in the series to start right now. It's one of those books where the characters are so well-done you don't want to lose touch with them.