Airport treat!
The rule is if you have to go to the airport, but it's not you that's coming or going, you get to buy yourself something from the shops.
Took Daughter #1 to the airport for her flight home after our summer holiday and picked this one to add to my list of books by male authors for the "2nd Canadian Book Challenge, Eh".

Moss "Precious" Elliott is a forty-something (am I supposed to interpret that as old?) burned-out newspaper reporter who finds himself having to take a job as a woman's page editor for a backwater newspaper. "Moss Elliott" sounds like a great name for a reporter. "Precious" is most decidedly and hilariously not.

It seems Precious was a half decent reporter at one time but a penchant for booze and some questionable conduct in Greece has resulted in his current situation - one which at least pays the bills and allows him to lay low. He takes a young wanna-be reporter under his wings to teach him the trade (or alternatively, that this is not what he wants to do with his life) when suddenly the town gossip is found murdered by a pair of scissors...and mayhem ensues.

To be honest, I don't know what people see in mystery novels. They strike me as a step up from Harlequin romances - but still pap for the brain. However, while I don't specifically remember reading anything Glover has written, his name is very familiar to me as an editor of the annual Best Canadian Stories which I love. So, I decided to investigate.

I was pleasantly surprised. While I don't know that the plot was all that mysterious - it's not too hard to figure out who done what - the book was "unputdownable" and it was hilarious. The character of Precious was just that - precious. Charming, clever, witty, sarcastic, bumbling, hapless and entirely over the top. I could easily envision a TV series, perhaps a Columbo-cum-Banacek but much funnier. In fact while I would say that Glover's/Precious's quick wit was the novel's strength, at times I thought it overdone and I sometimes felt like screaming, "Not every word has to be funny!"

One of the surprising things for me in having read this book is that I developed a respect for newspaper reporters. I am one of those who groans when I see improper grammar or misspelled words in my paper. Not that my writing skills are beyond reproach, but I don't make my living at it. Glover took me behind the scenes at "the paper" and made me realize that these newspaper guys really are a breed unto themselves. They go out and get the story and put it to paper in an astonishingly small amount of time. And they do it day after day after day! Whenever I write anything, even a letter to my mother, it takes me hours!

In any event, I don't imagine this has changed my overall view of mystery novels but this one was very well done and I'd recommend it to anyone who'd like a funny fast-paced clever read.

This is my tenth book by a Canadian male author and my twenty-second overall for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge, Eh?

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I'll let this one go at our BC meeting tonight. Either someone takes it or it'll sit on the shelf to wait for a new reader.

Other people, especially Pooker, always make books sound fabulous. I'm no mystery lover either but somehow, now I want to check this book out.

Perhaps I'll read it or maybe I won't get to it before July, but either way, it will be released as part of the 2009 Canada Day Release Challenge.

As an aside, I could really get behind this "airport treat" idea.....

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I'll be releasing this as part of the 2009 Canada Day Release Challenge!

Happy Canada Day!