Customer Reviews

Hook, Line, and Homicide (Paul Turner Mysteries)

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

 

 

It's vacation time, and - as in past years - Chicago police detective Paul Turner is heading up to rural Canada to do some fishing, with his life partner, Ben, his two boys Brian and Jeff, along with his precinct partner Buck Fenwick, his wife and girls. Coming along this year are Ian, Turner's ex who is now a journalist, and Mrs. Talucci, an elderly but feisty neighbor whom the boys consider a surrogate grandmother.

They barely get a chance to get settled in their houseboats, and they find a dead body washing up on shore, whom they recognize as the leader of a group of local punks who harrassed them on their day of arrival. When Ian finds out that this is the sixth young man to die in so many years, he starts nosing around town to see if there is a story to be written, which arouses the suspicion of the local egotistical police chief. Turner and Fenwick start to do some investigating on their own, and discover this seemingly quiet town has its own surprising secrets, including police corruption, prostitution, racism, homophobia, drugs, and even a small-time gay porn producer, as well as a mysterious benefactor on a distant island with whom Mrs. Talucci spends her time.

As has been the case with his 19 previous mystery novels (11 in the "Tom & Scott" series, with this being the 9th of the "Paul Turner" series), Zubro spins a creative and realistic mystery yarn that immediately and skillfully engages the reader's interest and curiousity. His best quality is his knack for pacing, feeding the reader little tidbits at a time, and that is also evident here, although he occasionally gets a bit verbose in having Turner dwell on lectures about homophobia or racism. A minor fault, in my opinion, and I still give it five stars out of five.

This is an entertaining read. It was a little dull in the middle with too much rambling conversations for me; I tended to lose track of who was who and what they were saying. However, there is enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages, enough humor to give the story occasional light-hearted reprieves and plenty of action to maintain the suspense. Mr. Zubro has a large cast of characters in this book and I feel he did a fairly good job at keeping them distinctive from one another. I also enjoyed the different setting for the story which nicely showed that the gorgeous North Woods of Canada aren't always bucolic and restful.

I often glance at these reviews before ordering a book, but even more often I return to them after reading the book to compare my own response to those of other readers. I've never written a review myself, but I'm going to take a stab at how significant I think this novel is here. If you haven't read Hook, Line and & Homicide, and don't want to know "who done it," skip to the two other reviews posted before this date, for there will be spoilers here. Come back later and tell me what you think.

I've given the work five stars, although I have a "style" complaint. It's a matter of my own taste, others may not agree, and the author may may be deliberately trying for an effect. Zubro gets repetitive with overwhelming use of the word "said" in writing conversations -- the "saids" line up like soldiers at the start of short sentences on some pages, especially when he's questioning a witness or a suspect. It's a risk in writing scenes of interigotation in a mystery, of course, but it gives the story a wooden style, a literary equivalent to the dialogue of Jack Webb in TV's Dragnet. There are descriptive alternatives that will tell the reader who is speaking. My rewrite of an exchange between Paul Turner and his sons on page 3 cuts four and leaves in just the first "said" :

Jeff said, "He's gonna look weird if he doesn't have any fishing stuff."
Brian made a crosseyed face. "He enjoys being wierd"
Jeff gave him a smirk. "And he won't drive with us. He's flying in."
Paul continued to sort lures in his tackle box. "Teenagers and kids make him nervous."
Brian stopped laughing. "Don't most people make him nervous?"

-- This sort of approach helps us see what the characters are doing, as well as keep track of who's speaking. Zubro is wonderful at descriptions of exciting, even violent action (the several dangerous scenes involving boats on the Lake of the Woods are examples) but conversations are mostly said, said, said. But, I firmly believe that an author has the right to shape and define the world of his novel as he chooses and the reader is a visitor to that world. If the "saids" are a conscious stylistic choice of Zubro's to enhance the "investigatory" nature of mystery writing, I'll put up with them, for I thoroughly enjoy my visits to the world of both the Paul Turner series and the neighboring Tom and Scott series.

We're away from the usual setting of Chicago here. The other books in the two Chicago series have a resonance for me, having grown up at the end of the South Shore commuter rail line in the corner of Indiana that is part of "Chicagoland" and having graduated from Northwestern University a half century ago. (I am also a distant relative of the original owner of the Cubs.) Zubro places this story in foreign territory I know well, however, from frequently using International Falls as a crossing point into Canada as Paul's family does. "They drove west until they picked up Highway 71 going north." If they'd stopped at Ontario's most perfect campsite park, Caliper Lake, just a few miles up 71, they might not have run into Scarth Krohn.

All this brings up Zubro's addition of insult to the injuries that the Bush administration has done to US-Canadian relations. It certainly goes in the face of the popular belief that Canada is a country where everybody politely minds his own business and things run in an orderly fashion. I've had crisis situations with a suddenly ill parent in Victoria, an elderly friend who went "missing" in Stratford, and the challenges of shooting a documentary on the streets and in the nightclubs of wonderfully sexually promiscuous Windsor, and Canadian police have been understanding and helpful (and when issuing a speeding ticket in B.C.). The chief of police in Cathura, Ontario, is a stupid, self-serving, biggoted bully. But then, there actually isn't any such town, and if it's an hour west of Kenora, it would be in Manitoba, anyway. Zubro has created a fictional town and rearranged geography just a bit, so, for the sake of a good story, let him populate it with a few losers and undesirables. (I've tried to google his choice of "Cathura," come up with some vampire stuff that might make sense, but.. I can trace "significance" too far, my students used to protest.) He has an authentic "feel" for the pace of life in the Kenora region and the abrupt entrance into the wilderness that you make when you venture out of town, off the road, or to the otherside of the island ahead of you. The Canadian tourist office will just have to put up with the notion that evil people can happen, even in Canada.

And putting Paul Turner into a murder mystery in a foreign country, where his status as a US policeman is irrelevant, allows him the privilege of exercising his conscience when he discovers that it was Kevin who killed Scarth. Knowing that the local police cannot be trusted to recognize an obvious instance of self defense, Paul can trust his own moral judgment and place Kevin in the safe-keeping of Mrs. Talucci's brother and his life partner. The scene of Paul's rescue of the suicidal Kevin is emotionally charged for the reader, from the description of the physical action of pulling the boy out of the lake and giving CPR right down to the detail of the frightened and grief-stricken teenager drenching the shoulder of Paul's flannel shirt with "tears and snot." Having Paul perceive this detail and not give a damn about it is part of the compassion that Zubro instills in Paul's richly drawn character. The depiction of the elderly male partners/lovers who take Kevin into their establishment out beyond the reach of the corrupt police of Cathura has a "deus ex machina" feel to it, and their compound far across the lake reads like a "gay Mafia" setup, but their wealth appears to have come from their own years of strenuous and honest labor -- and I'm close to their age, live in semi-isolation on a lake in the forest, and wouldn't mind having a collection of well educated, efficient, handsome mid-twenties males at hand to keep danger at a distance (I don't think they'd need to be armed, and the pistols the Canadians pack are against the law). Actually, this discovery of the brother and his lifestyle is consistent with the outrageous role Mrs. Talucci has played in Paul Turner's family throughout this series of books. Turner intuitively turns to the elderly pair for help with Kevin, and by the end of the story other details have demonstrated to the reader that Kevin had no option other than to kill Scarth, that no one else will suffer because of Paul's coverup, and that Ontario officialdom may get things straightened out eventually in Cathura.

The two other reviewers I've read have slightly complained about Paul's preachments about matters of gay rights and gay safety. They're brief, and I believe they are justified. He's certainly not wrong in suggesting that a Matthew Shepard incident could have happened in the Cathura environment. What's wrong with a touch of relevance?

Paul Turner is an exemplary man, not without flaw, but consciously striving to live up to intelligently formulated standards in his roles as policeman, citizen, and father. Zubro is especially effective in dealing with Paul's behavior with his boys, one confined to a wheelchair, the other intelligently working to define himself on the brink of manhood. When Paul unexpectedly finds Brian at a campfire on the lakeshore, just at the outset of activities that will lead to sexual contact with the teenage fishing guide Kevin, Paul slips off into the dark in his rowboat, trusting his son and the Canadian boy -- and taking the reader as well as himself away from the boys' privacy. It is not until Brian brings the subject up himself that Paul reminds Brian that he had said he was "going to the movies." There's no recrimination, no arguing, no laying on of guilt. They have a very simple discussion of how and why the lovemaking happened, what it meant to each of the boys, and that it was "more friendly and very safe. I do actually listen to you." It's a wonderful scene, obviously offered by Zubro as proof that Paul Turner's parenting skills are successful.

At one point in the scene, Brian is concerned that "I've never known somebody who committed a murder. He was a friend. Is a friend." The shift in tense at the end is a significant display of Brian's maturity and loyalty, but I wish Turner had corrected the boy about the use of the word "murder." I would have had Turner interject, "There's a distinction betweeen 'murder' and 'self defense', Brian. We know beyond any doubt that what Kevin did was not 'murder'." That is, after all, what the moral center of the novel is all about.

Given Brian's state of mind at the end of the story, I wish that he had been given a final scene with Kevin, although I wouldn't have described it for the reader. Phil, the handsome pilot of the cigarette boat, should again appear unexpectedly at the Turner's dock on the final day, but without Mrs. Talucci. This frightens Turner (the old girl is past 90), but Phil explains that Mrs. Talucci believes that Kevin and Brian should have an opportunity to talk before the Turner family leaves Canada and has sent Phil to fetch him to her brother's compound. Turner says that he'll get the boy and Phil can take them back across the lake. Phil says, "Mrs. Talucci says Brian should come by himself." Although Zubro does not have Paul narrate these stories, they are told in a way that is limited to his point of view. I would have Brian come back later with Mrs. Talucci to begin the trip home, keeping whatever transpired in the conversation with Kevin to himself. Paul would be perplexed, but his (I think wonderful) parenting style would once again respect his son's privacy. The reader's imagination can be tested for a while, and the fact that such a conversation had happened would bring added significance to the conversation between Brian and Paul that ends the novel.

Something else I would like to find in the novel is more complete use of Ben as Paul's partner, something more than a "babysitter" for the boys when Paul must be elsewhere. In the other Zubro series, Tom and Scott function as companions in crime solving, but they're both amateurs, and in this series, Paul is the "pro" and has Fenwick as a partner. But couldn't Paul two/three times in a novel crawl in to Ben's arms, stew about a problem, and get an insight that is at least part of the key to solving the case?

Something outside the perameters of this novel -- What happens to Kevin? Brian wants to be sure to come back next year to see Kevin again, but I'd like to see how that handsome mid-twenties Phil, with whom Kevin very quickly turned to helping with maintenance of the cigarette boat upon their arrival at the "gay mafia" compound, takes on the responsibility of helping Kevin heal from not only the self-defense killing but also the years of Scarth's rapes. There's tremendous story-telling opportunity here (but, it's outside the perview of Zubro's mysteries) and in my fantasies is already connected to Brian's state of mind when he returns from the visit I want him to have with Kevin on the last day -- Brian knows and is completely relieved at just how safe his friend is over on that island.

To end this -- Paul's decision to involve his family and friends in withholding "evidence" (making them the jury and himself the judge) despite his professional committment to upholding law and legal procedures, plus the questions that might be raised about Brian's experimentation with sex and Kevin (which I have barely suggested), and the exercise of Paul Turner's compassionate, wise parenting skills -- come together to make "Hook, Line & Homicide" a much more complicated and rewarding reading experience than just yet another gay murder mystery. I hate the thought of "using" a good read to "teach" something, yet questions of "what defines gay?" "what defines murder, rape, bullying, bigotry, stupidity, responsibilityl, etc?" "what defines friendship?"
"what defines being a good parent?" so abound in this simple, straight forward story (but do not overburden it) that I wish I had a group of slightly confused teenagers to read it with, hash out its issues, and get us all back on track. But I'd settle for the (not armed) mid-twenties on the property seeing that things keep operating smoothly.

Chicago police detective Paul Turner rents two houseboats on Lake of the Woods, Canada for his annual fishing trip. Accompanying Paul are his sons teen Brian and preadolescent Jeff, his significant other Ben, his CPD partner Buck Fenwick and his wife and their children.

Paul breaks up a fight between the Krohn's gang and five First Nation Canadian Indian kids caused by the bullying tactics of the former. However when he reports that the Krohn crowd caused the incident as the Indians were minding their business to the police, they ignore him insisting that the First Nation people always cause trouble. Soon afterward the Krohn gang harasses the "fags" renting the houseboat. Not long after that someone murders Krohn. Police Chief Shreppel arrests a First Nation's teen without any evidence except prejudice and hatred. Putting aside their rods and reels, Paul and Buck investigate as they know the homophobic racist cops will not.

HOOK, LINE & HOMICIDE is an interesting whodunit as the Chicago cops are outside their jurisdiction investigating a homicide that the local Canadian police prefer their solution. The assault on gay rights by government and so called family value gurus is given a personalized face especially when Jeff personalizes the venom as he cannot understand why his father is hated due to sexual preference. Although at times Paul can pontificate on racism, sexual preference harassment slowing the sleuthing story line down, fans of the series will appreciate the latest caper north of the border.

Harriet Klausner