Customer Reviews

Fulton County Blues: A Mystery Featuring Sunny Childs, P.I

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I actually don't like mysteries that much. This one's different. The characters are obstinately human, struggling with conflicting motives, giving in to childish impulse, or holding to a principle all out of proportion to its worth. The plot tears along, stuttering and veering enough to keep you off balance. It'll branch into what looks like a quiet eddy of reflection, a little background on the character, which turns out to be a ripping vortex, sucking you down into some new complexity. I don't want to give anything away, here, but there's ample forensic detail, clue-chasing, ironic repartee and squealing tires to please the hard-bitten mystery fan. There's also some rather disturbingly deep character stuff going on which pushes against the boundaries of the 'mystery' label. Don't expect to park it in the bathroom and read it a page a day.

Sunny Childs, a private detective at Atlanta's Peachtree Investigations, knows nothing about her father who died in Vietnam when she was eight years old. Her mother has always been reticent on the subject. Hoping for closure, Sunny travels to the Vietnam Memorial Wall, only to learn that her father's name is conspicuously absent.

As Sunny begins her quest to find out what really happened, a friend who served with her father in Nam, allegedly kills himself. The deceased's widow swears that he would never have committed such an act of self destruction because he shied away from guns ever since he left the service. Sunny obtains a list of former GIs who served with her father. She soon realizes that the troops are hiding a several decades old incident that involves the CIA, drug trafficking, and covert operations. If Sunny persists on obtaining the entire truth, she will have to confront the modern day tentacles of the CIA, who have reasons to keep her father's story erased.

The war in Nam has been over for more than two decades, but for those who served and those anxiously waiting for news of their loved ones, the anger, resentment, and confusion remain as powerful as it was in the late sixties-early seventies. Many individuals, even some to young to understand what was happening at that time, still struggle with coping from the horror and ultimate uselessness of the effort. With dignity and respect, FULTON COUNTY BLUES looks inside the head of an indirect victim of the war. Readers will agree that Ruth Birmingham has written a compassionate, empathic, and realistic journey.

Harriet Klausner

People who read a lot of contemporary mysteries are certainly well-accustomed by now to story lines in which the scars, physical and emotional, of America's Viet Nam experience are featured prominently. More than a few "hard-boiled" detectives are themselves traumatized Viet Nam veterans (Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch comes to mind), and the variously shady aspects of American involvement in that unfortunate nation, from drug-smuggling to war crimes are shown through the vehicle of crime fiction to have consequences for countless people even decades after American involvement in the war in southeast asia finally ended in the early seventies.

In this short but fascinating novel, Ruth Birmingham makes her own contribution to this *corpus* of post-Viet Nam mystery literature through the quest by her protagonist, Sunny Childs, to discover the fate of her long-lost father, who reportedly was killed mysteriously in Viet Nam, and yet his name does not appear on the Washington, D.C., Viet Nam Memorial. Why?

The story is imaginative, complex, and sometimes horrifying, and it successfully dredges up a lot of the most painful aspects of the Viet Nam war and its aftermath. Once started, it's a hard book to put down.

The only real weakness of the novel is that its basic structure involves Sunny in a series of encounters with Viet Nam vets and other characters who in turn provide their own recollections of the "real story" of what happened in Viet Nam involving Sunny's father. There is something of a "Rashamon" quality to the different perspectives offered by the various characters, and this makes for fascinating reading. However, there is also a certain literary clunkiness to the way that this succession of narratives is set up. Formerly taciturn characters suddenly launch into long and revealing monologues that seem in some cases really contrived. This structural flaw notwithstanding, the book is certainly fascinating and it contains some real historically significant insights regarding the history of American involvement in southeast Asia.

Being familiar with the Atlanta setting for the story, I can also vouch for Birmingham's knowledge of that metropolis and its geographical intricacies. Consequently, Atlantans especially will find Ruth Birmingham's work fun to read.

I am not one who typically goes for mysteries. I read about the author, Walter Sorrells (Ruth Birmingham is a pen name) a few weeks ago in the newspaper and purposed to pick up one of his books. I was not disappointed. The mystery revolves around Sunny Childs, a single thirty-something who works for an Atlanta private investigations firm. After a suicide committed by one of her late Father's fellow soldiers, she yearns to find out more about her Father, killed in Vietnam. In addition, she is asked to look into the death of the fellow soldier by his disbelieving widow. The ensuing story unfolds with a complex plot filled with intrigue, deception, lies and attrocities involving the Vietnam era.
I highly recommend this book as a good mystery and an excellent dissection of the effect of the past on all of us.