Customer Reviews

High Season (Frank Coffin Mysteries)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having grown up on hard boiled detectives, I expect my heros to be 2 parts Sam Spade, 2 parts Harry Callahan and 1 part Sherlock Holmes. However, Frank Coffin isn't any part of those characters. Instead, he is a realistic depiction of someone who has lived a tough life doing a tough job. Coffin has a "history" that dates back to his days on Baltimore, PD. At crime scenes, he has flashbacks and panic atacks every time he investigates a new victim. Although this behavior might make you think he is weak, actually, it makes him perfectly human. In fact, I don't think I would want to know someone who could look at a murder victim and not be sickened.

But for me, the main character in the story, and the reason I read it in the first place, is not Frank Coffin. It is actually (in my mind) the town where the action takes place - Provincetown, MA. Having vacationed at the Cape for over 20 years, I think the author has captured the spirit and character of the locals very well. He makes it perfectly plausable that there would be tension between the real estate developers and the old time residents. Over the 20 years we have been going there, P'Town had evolved, and not necessarily for the better.

Like Donna Leon's books centered in Venice, Italy and Chris Grabenstein's books written with a New Jersey Shore flavor, Loomis has delivered an excellent novel that provides a well written story with a wonderful sense of place (my favorite type of mystery).

If you like crisp writing, a good plot, 3 dimentional characters and more than a few plot twists, you will enjoy High Season.

I mean really! Sometimes the very best dishes are those in which a bit of this, a pinch of that, a blob of something else, and a shake or two of an herb or spice, are blended all together into a crock pot, stirred occasionally, and left to simmer for a good long while. That's what this novel made me think of, as I merrily turned pages, reading like mad! I was very unhappy when the book ended, as I'd grown to really like and appreciate almost all of the really wacky characters contained within.

Provincetown, Mass, is a very colorful place, and somewhat precarious as well, perched as it is out on the end of Cape Cod. It's become somewhat of a haven for gays and lesbians, especially tourists. Some of these latter (the tourists, I mean) are a bit strange in more ways than one. An example of this is the viciously anti-gay TV evangelist who likes to dress up in ladies garments, complete with undies and wig and the whole nine-yards. But it's his death that precipitates the rest of the town's crises, that come rapidly one after another.

Poor Frank Coffin, a native who's now a police officer there, knows everyone, including (excuse the expression) where the bodies are buried. His family have been sailors for generations, but he gets motion-sick, so stays on land, at least most of the time. He spent a good many years being a cop in Baltimore, but the end of an unhappy marriage combined with panic attacks caused by the job, brought him back home again, and it's just more of beating his head against a brick wall.

His lover, a few years younger, suffers from a rapidly-ticking clock. She wants to have a baby (but not to get married) while Frank isn't too sure of all that. His partner Lola (Lesbo-Cop) is seriously a woman I'd like to have at my side if I ever had to tangle with any bad guys.

I loved this story, and think anyone who appreciates fabulous writing, great off-the-wall characters, a tightly-woven plot that actually makes sense, all mixed together with a great sense of humor will like it, too. Try it. You might agree with me!

The first installment in the Coffin series, this book was delightfully entertaining. Loomis fleshes out his characters not only with uniquely hilarious detail, but humanizes them through the comforting realities of their morose and often psychotic tendencies. With moral concepts pleasantly askew, it becomes difficult to truly dislike any members of p-town's estranged population - a perfect formula for mystery in this fast paced who done it style tale of tall ships, sex, money and... lobster racing?

A revitalizing first addition to an increasingly overly serious genre, this book is often more than just a fun read, subtly employing the aesthetic skill apparent in the author's previously published books of poetry. One can hardly wait to see what myriad of trouble coffin will be infiltrating next.

edit: I couldn't help but read this book a second time. Good replay value.

I don't normally read mystery novels. When I do read one, I enjoy the fact that the mystery gives me an excuse to poke around into the lives of the people and the community surrounding the crime. High Season delivers that in a big way. Loomis' book is full of human, imperfect, likeable characters, and now I feel like I've lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the novel is set. Loomis' Provincetown is a rich and variegated confluence of old-time fishermen, affluent tourists and other "summer people", and profit-minded developers. I'm just afraid that if I ever visit the real Provincetown, I'll like Loomis' version better.

I should mention, however, now that I've said I'm more interested in the characters than the plot, that the plot, in addition to encouraging me to take a closer and more skeptical look at some of the characters, had me turning pages furiously, especially toward the final wrap-up at the end.

So, when I can I start reading the next book in the Frank Coffin series? I'm ready.

From 1970 to 1980 I owned a house with four apartments in Provincetown. Before that and up to this day I still think of P'Town as my favorite town in the world and visit it as often as possible. I try to read books that feature the town. So it was that I read "High Season" by Jon Loomis. He has caught the flavor and the character of the town better than a number of other writers who have tried to encapsulate it. He uses some real places and some easily recognizable fictional places as well as recycling a lot of actual familiar town family names. There are a lot of laughs in the book.
In this mystery he creates interesting and eccentric characters, has a smooth, no-nonsense narrative style, and knows how to engage his readers and tell a good story. The police detective protagonist Frank Coffin seems real and believable because he has flaws and foibles as do his cast of characters. A series of murders keeps the reader and Coffin off balance.
Here's a character talking about Coffin: "He's a nonlinear thinker--jumps around from A to R to Z and back to F until he gets the whole picture. It works, but it's like watching a bear peeling a grape."
An influx of guppies and yuppies have tried to gentrify what is a unique bit of Americana. P"town has suffered from over development. This becomes a major element in the story. The backdrop of the story involves a group of pro-development vultures. But the plot calls for a level of suspension of disbelief that is beyond the pale; the ending, however, is very suspenseful and exciting with two separate villains and three people figuratively tied to the tracks. It's a fun ride with a great town faithfully portrayed in the foreground.

There's nothing like a mystery with a strong sense of place. Jon Loomis' High Season, set in Provincetown, manages to feature both the town and Frank Coffin as its two main characters. Coffin, a cop and the main character, both belongs and doesn't belong in Provincetown. As protaganists in police procedurals go, he's as engaging as they come. And Provincetown, which I have never visited, comes across as a vibrant and complicated city on the verge of many changes.

While Loomis' mystery is set in the location of Provincetown, the motivation for the crime committed in this novel will resonate for readers throughout the United States. If I say more, I'll give it away. Like Carl Hiaasen, Loomis takes a unique location and digs up its dirt.

I stayed up late to finish this novel, which I don't do much anymore. But when I finished, I was sorry to see it end. I'd grown quite attached to Coffin, to his coworker, Lola, and to the nefarious Uncle Rudy who was always lying in the weeds.

I couldn't put this book down - great story line(s).
It kept me captivated. Well worth the read for a first
time writer of fiction.

Just finished "High Season". I loved it. Great characters, wonderful setting. I made an effort to find it after
reading "Mating Season" which I also really enjoyed. Hope there are more to come.

This is the series debut of Frank Coffin, an ex-Baltimore homicide detective who got sick - literally - of seeing dead bodies. So he quit the force and moved back to his hometown of Provincetown, Massachusetts to become a police officer there - working for his uncle - the Chief of Police. Frank's logic being that working in Provincetown where "alternate lifestyles" are the norm, his weak psyche wouldn't be haunted by murderers and their victims.

Well, so much for logic and best laid plans. The book opens with the disappearance of a gay-bashing TV evangelist who likes to dress up in drag. Not bad for an opener. Said preacher - His body dressed in a muumuu - is soon found and Frank is once again tasked with solving a murder.

High Season is full of characters - at times too many - and a lot of the local Provincetown color - at times too much - which does hinder the plot/pacing of the tale. That being said, the book is still an entertaining read and I will look for its sequel. I'm also curious to see how the series evolves as there is a Carl Hiaasen-esque potential here with both the characters and locale.

A burnt-out Baltimore homicide detective returns to gay and safe Provincetown, Ma.,to write parking tickets, nurse drunken tourists and deal with his corrupt kinfolk. Suddenly dead bodies start cropping up everywhere and the old anxieties about blood resurface. Reason for the deaths is evident to us early on but this is NOT a typical "whodunit;" there is no catalog of suspects and the victims are barely introduced (or not) before they are dispensed with. It is an okay read but not compelling and the tacked-on Hollywood ending was somewhat absurd. Some good ideas poorly constructed.