Customer Reviews

Hound: a novel

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I just finished reading this book and I wanted to write the review right away, hoping someone else will see it and buy the book, I want to be the one to have suggested it. I loved this book, and wanted someone else to read it and enjoy it like I did. I bought it on Kindle, otherwise I would have just mailed my copy to someone for them to enjoy. No I take that back, I wouldn't want to part with my copy after all!
From the beginning of the book, I was so involved, I just wrapped myself with the characters and the stories that the characters were telling me. I can't quite explain why I loved it. It bills itself as a mystery, and although there were two mysteries in the book that needed solving, that is not what kept me reading. I guess it was the author's writing style, and I guess his characters. I was just sucked in and could not put it down. I was so glad it was a rainy day here today, so I had an excuse to stay curled up on the sofa until I had finished the book.
I hope to see this character again, I was not ready to let him go, not just because of my love for books and he is a book dealer, but I just adore him, I am worried about what is going to happen to him next.
Great story, great writing, just a great book.

First Sentence:

Henry Sullivan is a book hound. He buys books at estate and library sales, most often selling them to other dealers and bookstore owners. Morgan Johnson, once his lover now recently widowed, ask Henry to appraise the library of her late husband with plans to donate the collection. When Morgan is found strangled, Henry becomes the initial suspect. Although the police release him from that role, Henry does want to know who killed Morgan.

This is a real book lover's book. McCaffrey, the author, is the owner of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, located for 30 years on Newbury Street in Boston but now an online bookstore. The greatest pleasure, in reading this book, comes from his insights on book lovers--"...The ones who really loved the books liked to browse, dip into a page here and there, and feel the cloth and smell the paper."--readers, collectors, non-readers--"Maybe some rainy day, they'll read one of these book and it will change their lives or at least make them want to read another. It's possible."--Reader's Digest editions and a very frank look at the publishing industry.

As a mystery, it's not particularly strong. The characters are not fully developed. I finished the book not really know who Henry is as a person, but identifying with him as a book lover. The other characters were interesting, but remained enigmatic.

The sense of place is strong when the setting is a room containing books, but although the book is set in Boston--a city I lived in and love--there was no real sense of the city. The mystery is there and interesting but, as befitting the character, not very suspenseful. However, I did very much like the ending.

This is one of those books I find hard to rate. As a mystery on its own, it was only good at best. As homage to those of us who love the written word and the vessels in which they are contained, it was excellent. For me, if McCaffrey writes a second mystery, I shall definitely read it.

HOUND (Ama. Sleuth-Henry Sullivan-Boston-Cont) - VG
McCaffrey, Vincent - 1st mystery
Small Beer Press, 2009, US Hardcover - ISBN: 9781931520591

The subtly of "Hound" by Vincent McCaffrey calls for a reread to try to figure out why the book is so entrancing.

The short answer it that it's not just a slow-paced, tragic murder mystery, it packs in a second tragedy, as well as meditations on books and the book business, history both personal and universal, love, loss, motivations for murder, and the psychological aspects of chess and surviving urban gentrification.

While our protagonist bookseller may seem passive or emotionally blunted, it actually serves to enable the reader to tolerate the examination of human tragedies and the ways in which people react to them. After all, one of the reasons people blunt their emotions is because of the loses they've had to endure.

I'm mid-way through Hound right now, and not sure that I will finish it. I love to read, love mysteries, love crime novels, and see much merit in Hound - great sense of place and knowledge of the book world. I'm just not finding it terribly compelling or enthralling - I don't know if I want to know how it ends. Not my speed, apparently - Hound takes its own time getting going, slowly and politely.

A book hound, who has a business of locating and selling books to used book dealers finds himself sorting through death and a few romantic interests while trying to resolve where his life is headed. McCaffrey beautifully captures the love of books in this well written and enjoyable book.

Any novel that features someone in the book business solving a mystery is likely to appeal to a biblioholic, and Hound is no exception. Vincent McCaffrey, the owner of Victor Hugo Books in Boston (formerly an excellent bricks-and-mortar bookshop that provided hours of browsing fun, now, alas, an internet-only business), uses his knowledge of the used book trade to great effect. Put this volume on the shelf alongside John Dunning's Cliff Janeway series and Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand books and create a biblio-heaven for the mystery buff.

Henry sells used books on the internet, but only to other dealers so as to avoid tax problems. He doesn't make a lot of money, but he makes enough to be comfortable in his small apartment in one of Boston's classier neighborhoods, in a house built while John Quincy Adams was president. Henry is single, but a few years ago he had an affair with Morgan Johnson, a woman then married to a man a good many years her elder, and in poor health. Morgan ultimately found that her conscience would not allow her to sustain the affair. Henry was heartbroken; even though Morgan was a number of years his senior, he loved her.

Heber Johnson, Morgan's husband, spent his career as a literary agent for some of the most prominent American authors of the twentieth century. When Hound opens, Heber has recently died. Morgan resurfaces from the past to ask Henry to value the most personal portion of Heber's library: those books that were inscribed to him by his clients. It's an amazing collection, as McCaffrey describes it. Anyone with his or her own collection of twentieth century first editions is likely to salivate at the description, despite McCaffrey's inclusion of a couple of fictional authors.

The appointment for the appraisal of the books turns physical, as Morgan and Henry pay a brief, tender visit to their past together. That is why it is all the more gut-wrenching when the police show up at Henry's door the next day and drag him in for questioning regarding Morgan's murder. Henry is not content to leave finding the perpetrator to the police, and he follows the clues left in the Johnsons' library to attempt to discover the truth on his own.

Even while he is working to solve this mystery, Henry is also preoccupied by a mystery from the past. His friend, Albert, runs a salvage operation often called into a home after the death of the owners to clear it out and prepare it for sale. One home yields a cache of bestsellers from the earliest years of the twentieth century, all in near mint condition. Along with the books is a pile of letters written by a young woman who, uncharacteristically for the time, explored Europe on her own while in her 20s. Henry tries to find out what happened to her, and how and why her library came to be walled up in an old house.

Much of Hound turns on the hazard of the estate tax (otherwise known as the inheritance tax), which I found puzzling. In 2009, when this book was copyrighted, the first $3.5 million of any estate was exempt from federal taxation, and the first $1 million exempt from taxation by the State of Massachusetts. Although Heber's children are in somewhat desperate need of money, it seems unlikely that $1 million wouldn't cover their problems. And the estate, though clearly sizable, doesn't seem likely to exceed $3.5 million in value. But perhaps this is a problem only for bookworms who are also lawyers, and won't give pause to any other reader.

The book lore contained in this novel is great fun. I happened to read it just a day or two before attending the Sacramento Book Fair, and was pleased to come across a number of first editions by Earl Stanley Gardner, just as described in Hound. I enjoyed the discussion of such things as the relative merits of authors like John Updike and Tom Wolfe and the diminishment of the once-proud literary establishment into a business so strongly tied to the profits made in the current quarter that good authors aren't given the time to build an audience. For me, this type of detail was the best reason to read the book; the mystery was nice, but secondary.

This quiet book isn't for those who want a thrill on every page. Nor is it for the reader of classic mysteries who want a scrupulously fair mystery that allows him or her to solve the puzzle before the author reveals the identity of the culprit. But for those of us who love books about books, this is a vital addition to our personal libraries.

If you like books about books, I don't think you also necessarily have to love Boston in order to enjoy McCaffrey's "Hound".

I have to admit that I read "Hound" for fun and didn't look up most of the authors and titles McCaffrey mentions in his novel. Still, I liked it.