Customer Reviews

Shell Game (A Professor Simon Shaw Mystery)

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

 

 

Professor Simon Shaw's close friend has been murdered and he finds that he is to be Executor of the Will. The Sheriff has told him to keep out of this case; he was too close to the victim to be objective and his help was neither necessary nor desirable. So begins another adventure of the historian, sometime amateur detective, who can't seem able to avoid running into murders in either his peaceful academic community nor in his rural-small home town in North Carolina.
. This is certainly among the better mystery series which have found their way onto the Kindle e-book reader. The author does a fine professional job of writing and creates interesting plots with plenty of room for an assortment of characters who are worth meeting. The hero, Simon Shaw is a congenial fellow with whose forensic sideline it is entertaining to be involved. I can recommend this book for most followers of the relatively non-violent detective story.

The book is fine, but the Kindle edition is awful. The formatting is terrible with sentences broken, section headings hard to discern and the original paragraph structure lost. This led to multiple quotes in one paragraph (normally new voices are indicated by new paragraphs). Since Shaber often lets the flow of the dialog identify the speaker, the loss of paragraphing made it difficult to track who said what. There were even some sentences out of order. Whoever created the Kindle edition did a great disservice to both the reader and the author. I will be very hesitant to purchase another Kindle edition from the author if this is the quality of the formatting.

Shell Game is the second Simon Shaw book I have read, and I am looking forward to reading all in the series. Simon is a very likable character, a brilliant young history professor at a small Southern college. The author is very good at portraying the jealousies and ambitions that seethe beneath the seemingly calm surface of academia. The vicious murder of a popular faculty member, a good friend of Simon, sets up the plot, and the author weaves a clever web of intrigue. Highly recommended!

I enjoy Simon Shaw as a forensic historian and I enjoy insights into my birth state of North Carolina. I have bought all the titles and I am recommending them to others.