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Title: The Last Song Dogs by Sinclair Browning ISBN: 0-553-57940-1 Publisher: Crime Line Pub. Date: 06 April, 1999 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.18 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A grand debut
Comment: In La Ciegna, Arizona, lays Trade Ellis' Vaca Grande ranch. Trade not only is a top notch cowhand, she also works as a private investigator. Her cases typically consist of insurance scams and cheating spouses. However, currently she has the biggest case of her career. Someone is systematically mutilating the Song Dogs, her own high school's cheerleaders from twenty-five years ago. Of the eight, four have died under very ugly circumstances in the last three months.
Two of the surviving individuals, Charlene Williamson and Buffy Patina, hire Trade to ferret out the killer. Trade quickly finds evidence that clearly links the murders. However, determining who is the culprit remains difficult. In high school and the subsequent years since, the Song Dogs, known as the high school's "golden girls" have made many enemies.
Sinclair Browning's debut novel is a rousing success. The mystery is cleverly formulated as the perpetrator once revealed by the author becomes obvious (in a Monday morning quarterbacking way). Trade is a likable individual, who seems real because she knows fear even though she intrepidly continues her task. THE LAST SONG DOGS hopefully is the first installment of what should be a delightful series.
Harriet Klausner
Rating: 3
Summary: Neat concept weighed down by standard plotting
Comment: Open up "The Last Song Dogs," a debut mystery by Sinclair Browning, and the temptation was irrestible to deconstruct its private investigator, Trade Ellis.
She's part Apache, comments on the culture clashes and takes part in native American ceremonies. Tony Hillerman? She's single, in her fourties, dates sometimes and tells her story with that sometimes world-weary edge of the outsider. Sue Grafton? Plus, when she's not investigating, she's running her family's 600-acre cattle ranch outside Tuscon, Arizona. Hmmm, Marnie Davis Kellog, only without the money?
No author would appreciate that kind of treatment, but Trade is composed of such disparate parts that it was hard to take her seriously at first. It even seemed a bit of a spoil to pair her with a conventional mystery involving the murder of a squad of high school cheerleaders 25 years after the last pom-pom was thrown. A Western noirish title like "The Last Song Dogs" deserved better.
Anyway, cheerleaders we got so we're stuck with them. Trade went to school with the members of the Song Dogs, so when three of them died within three months: one by salmonella poisoning, another shot and robbed, and the third brutally killed, the surviving women ask Trade to investigate. The resulting mystery runs along conventional lines. Trade tracks down the remaining Song Dogs, as well as the classmates who knew them. Some of the women have married well, some haven't, and one even spent time in jail for manslaughter. There's a creepy character with an unusual collection, and Trade gets followed and run off the road. Eventually, she cracks the case, but not before pulling a boneheaded stunt that had to be done to set up the standard final confrontation. Yet, while the story ran along conventional lines, Trade is an amiable detective to follow, and one hopes for a better story next time.
Rating: 5
Summary: A first rate story from a dirty shirt cowgirl
Comment: This book is delicious.
There is nothing so malicious as betrayed trust -- forget about jealousy, revenge, greed, hate and pure lust, the normal human foibles that most writers use as murder motives. Browning goes straight for the heart in this story.
Trust is the basis of all human relationships. Trade Ellis, the fictional private eye who Browning writes about, usually handles routine investigations. But when old school friends come to her for help, before their class 25th reunion party, she sets aside her doubts about investigating murder and trusts her friends from school. Her task, with four people already dead, is to discover who is killing their senior year cheerleading squad.
She weaves a chilling story, packed with authentic detail that is obviously based on reliable law enforcement sources. She lists Asa Bushnell from the Pima County Sheriff's office as a source; I've known Asa since 1972, and he is one of the most honorable and decent newsmen ever to have worked at The Tucson Citizen and later as a press officer in the sheriff's office. Using Asa as a source on crime is better than having the Pope as a reference on Catholicism. She couldn't have found a better source.
Second, she has a superb feel for Arizona ranch operations. She knows the area she writes about, I've hiked it on foot and driven through it dozens of times. Browning presents a deft and accurate image of Tucson on the other side of the mountains, it's a relief to find a mystery writer who describes in loving detail something more than a hero's macho manly motives and mischief. She offers an accurate look into the real Arizona outside the city limits.
But, the essence of her story is the betrayal of trust. In a criminal case, the police suspect everyone, similar to a reporter's standard level of suspicion, "If your Mum says she loves you, check it out." Trade Ellis is neither cop nor reporter, she's a private investigator who trusts some old school friends and ends up betrayed.
Some people are like that. Unlike some criminals, who have the courage to face their victims, cowards rely on the trust, honor and decency of their victims to lure them into betrayal. In this case, it's marital betrayal; the fury of a frantic woman who discovered she could not trust someone and so set about eliminating all possible rivals.
You know the old saying, "A man suspects one other man, a woman suspects every other woman." Okay, so that's the start. When sexual betrayal is uncovered, it literally tears the victim's heart out and tramples it in the dust. Nothing is so cruel as this betrayal of trust. Browning captures this mood deftly. It leaves the victim shattered. Be prepared to learn what the impact of betrayal is like, and how it destroys lives.
Now, take those components -- authentic settings and police procedures plus a motive that strikes fear into any decent heart -- and you have the mixture for a more than ordinary mystery. What's more, she writes with a great sense of humor. Browning combines it all into a great story.
Browning isn't an ordinary mystery writer. She's much better. Thank goodness some intelligent women are expanding the genre beyond blood, guts, guns and senseless fists and instead creating stories about motivations instead of mere mayhem.
.She's written at least two later Trade Ellis mysteries. This is one mystery writer who deserves success. Read it. You'll be delighted.
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Title: Rode Hard, Put Away Dead by Sinclair Browning ISBN: 0553583271 Publisher: Crime Line Pub. Date: 30 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Crack Shot by Sinclair Browning ISBN: 055358328X Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 29 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Traggedy Ann by Sinclair Browning ISBN: 0553586394 Publisher: Dell Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Confidence Woman by Judith Van Gieson, Judith Van Gieson ISBN: 0451205006 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: February, 2002 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Scorpion Rain by David Cole ISBN: 0380819716 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $6.50 |
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