Combat in the ColdThe fourth book of the Elliot Lake series:
COMING SOON |
|
|
AVAILABLE NOW!
CONFLICT in the COVE is here!
Elliot has his hands full this time -- when The Bad Thing comes to the Cove, it doesn't mess around.
Elliot has his hands full this time -- when The Bad Thing comes to the Cove, it doesn't mess around.
|
FROM SEEDLINGS TO A FOREST
|
Celebrate creativity and magic.
Novels
From adult mysteries and romance to tales of magical realism for the young at heart.
|
Not novels
Original art (illustration, embroidery, and ?) will be featured on this website as the designs grow and come into fruition.
|
Sometimes you just need a mug
From all the cool things celebrating our novels to prints and merchandise featuring original Treetangle designs.
|
Join the Mailing List:
Treetangle Talk
Sign up so you never miss an update, contest, or freebie.
Treetangle's goal is to produce newsletters that inform, delight, and entertain.
Like a little drop of Pacific Northwest sun shining through the dark clouds,
they will show up in your email box just when you need a break.
(Your email will never be sold or shared!)
Treetangle's goal is to produce newsletters that inform, delight, and entertain.
Like a little drop of Pacific Northwest sun shining through the dark clouds,
they will show up in your email box just when you need a break.
(Your email will never be sold or shared!)
Happy People
This is my favorite review.... from someone who doesn't even normally read in this genre, HE STILL GOT IT. This makes me happy!
And yes, I love my Elliot Lake. A long, but wonderful, review of Cursed from the Cradle:
And yes, I love my Elliot Lake. A long, but wonderful, review of Cursed from the Cradle:
Quick description of cozy mysteries: a genre of crime stories where the crime takes place in a small community where everybody knows each other and have long-time, even generational relationships with each other and they’re all up in everybody’s business. The detectives in these stories are generally amateurs and mostly women. The example that most people would be familiar with is the long-running and highly-successful “Murder She Wrote” starring Angela Lansbury as mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher who always seems to be stumbling over dead bodies. In fact, there’s a fan theory that has it that Jessica herself was actually the murderer and framed all the people who went to jail for the crime as there was no possible way she could have encountered all those murders by happenstance.
I myself have very little familiarity with the genre myself as my taste in detective fiction runs toward the hard-boiled. I’m more down with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Chester Himes. But I do believe that with the plethora of good fiction available, there’s simply no good reason to obsessively limit one’s self to one type of fiction. So, when CURSED FROM THE CRADLE: THE ELLIOT LAKE MYSTERIES I became available to me, I thought it a good time to check out what the genre had to offer.
The beautiful town of Alder Bay on the Oregon coast is one of those communities far enough away from the big cities that the inhabitants can cheerfully pretend the outside world might as well not exist. It’s not a big town. In fact, it’s so small it only has one unmarried Chinese-American resident; Elliot Lake, chief reporter for the town’s weekly newspaper. Elliot’s a friendly, easy-going guy, well-liked by the residents and seemingly satisfied with his life and his job. A lot of the pleasure I got out of reading the book is Elliot’s wry, laconic thoughts about the town and its people, most of whom we get to know very well indeed when a series of child kidnappings commence.
This is less a straight-up and down relentless hunt for the kidnapper(s) stealing young children and more of a study of how the kidnappings affect the town and how the inhabitants deal with it and their relationships with each other as it soon becomes apparent that whoever is snatching the kids has intimate knowledge of their movements. It has to be someone living in Alder Bay and for Elliot, the thought that the kidnapper(s) has to be somebody he considers a friend is as frightening as the fact of the kids being stolen. Elliot isn’t just some small-timer. He’s worked for Seattle newspapers and as such he’s trained to observe. How could he be that close to somebody that capable of such a crime and not have seen them for what they are? Well, that’s possibly because he’s distracted with girlfriend problems as well as dealing with a surprise visit from his parents. Let’s just say that Elliot has issues with them he is neither qualified nor prepared to cope with and we’ll leave it at that. In fact, goodly portions of the novel are taken up with Elliott and his personal problems to the degree that if you decide to read the book (and I do recommend you read it) you may at one point (as I do admit I did) say to yourself; “Well, shucks…they don’t seem very worry about finding these damn kids. And if they don’t care then why should I?”
And that’s where you’d be making the mistake. Because that isn’t the kind of book Cynthia Moyer is writing. Cynthia’s characters are deeply concerned about finding the missing kids. It’s just that life has to go on while they’re looking for them. People still have to go to work. Kids still have to go to school. Dogs have to be fed. Clothes still have to be washed, ironed and folded away. Cynthia obviously likes these characters a lot and knows her fictional town as well as Michael Jordan knows how to handle a basketball. Yes, there are some characters that wander in and out of the story with no good reason at all save that Cynthia wants them to be there and there’s one character that every time she showed up I wished that the book was a movie I could fast forward through the scenes with her but on the whole, I had a pretty good time with the story and characters. Enough that I’m engaged enough to want to read the sequel. Good job, Cynthia.