Customer Reviews

Goodlow's Ghosts

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've read six of T.M. Wright's novels so far. My favorites are "Sleepeasy" and "Goodlow's Ghosts."

Wright is probably best-known for his early novels "Strange Seed" and "A Manhattan Ghost Story," but I recommend that newcomers try one of his Ryerson Biergarten novels first.

Biergarton is a psychic detective who appears in at least four novels: The Changing, The Devouring, Goodlow's Ghosts, and The Ascending.

( "The Changing" and "The Devouring" were both written under the pen name F.W. Armstrong. )

"Goodlow's Ghosts" has two main plot threads.

(1) Former PI Sam Goodlow has been killed in a hit-and-run. Biergarten tries to help his ghost.

(2) Jack Lutz's wife Stevie walks into an abandoned building and doesn't come out. She has literally disappeared. Mr. Lutz asks Biergarten to find his wife.

(I'm deliberately being vague to avoid spoilers.)

This isn't a perfect book. (I gave it five stars only because Amazon doesn't allow 4.5 stars.) However, its flaws are minor, and the book is very entertaining.

The editorial review from Publishers Weekly that Amazon reprints on this page contains some inaccuracies.

From the Publishers Weekly review provided by Amazon:

"Extraneous vignettes about men seduced by not-of-this-world women only string the audience along, and appearances by near-human apparitions, some of whom identify themselves as Goodlow, are simply never explained."

I'm a little annoyed because the reviewer didn't understand what was going on.

The vignettes aren't "extraneous." They're related to one of the two main plot threads.

And, as far as I know, the apparitions who identify themselves as Goodlow are really Goodlow. The book explains that Goodlow loses his memory sometimes.

( It's annoying when a reviewer doesn't bother to read a book closely enough to understand the plot. )