Deadline: A Jack McMorrow Mystery - Hardcover

Like many crime novelists Gerry Boyle began his writing career in newspapers―a place he calls the best training ground ever. After attending Colby College, he knocked around at various jobs, including stints as a roofer, a postman, and a manuscript reader at a big New York publisher. He began his newspaper career in the paper mill town of Rumford, Maine. There was a lot of small-town crime in Rumford and Gerry would later mine his Rumford time for his first novel, DEADLINE. After a few months he moved on to the Maine Morning Sentinel in Waterville, where editors gave his a thrice-weekly column and he wrote about stuff he saw in police stations, courtrooms, in the towns and cities of Maine. All the while he was also typing away on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, writing Deadline which came out in 1993. Since Deadline, he has written 8 additional Jack McMorrow stories with a 10th scheduled for release in 2015.

First-novelist Boyle deftly transplants a big-city noir atmosphere to the western Maine mill town of Androscoggin, where the discovery of a freelance photographer's body floating in the canal leads newspaper editor Jack McMorrow into a series of intrigues. Stumbling onto a scandal and cover-up, he is threatened by a temporarily insane woman, kidnapped, beaten and very nearly murdered himself. McMorrow is an outsider--he took over editorship of the weekly Androscoggin Review after stints at the New York Times and other papers--and his first-person narrative exudes the cynicism of an achiever laid low by hubris, striking just the right note for his story. The author, himself an award-winning columnist, uses his insider's knowledge of the newspaper business to give his plot plenty of texture; he also delivers realistic characterizations, diverting subplots and evocative descriptions of rural Maine. Turning what could have been a contrived ending into a powerful, scary denouement, Boyle shocks readers into the recognition that life, in all of its subtlety, will constantly contradict itself. A fine debut; one hopes to see more of McMorrow.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.