Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher:
Publish America
Release Date: December 2003
ISBN: 1-4137-0309-7
Awards:  
Format Reviewed: Softcover
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Genre: Fantasy / Mystery
Reviewed: 2004
Reviewer: Kristin Johnson
Reviewer Notes: Reviewer, Kristin Johnson, released her second book, CHRISTMAS COOKIES ARE FOR GIVING, co-written with Mimi Cummins, in October 2003. Her third book, ORDINARY MIRACLES: My Incredible Spiritual, Artistic and Scientific Journey, co-written with Sir Rupert A.L. Perrin, M.D., is now available from Publish America.  
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Fractured
By Ryan Mayers


      You have to hand it to kids today: they’ve grown up reading Harry Potter and watching “NYPD Blue,” and the result is the synthesis of magic and hard-boiled police fiction in a mystery called Fractured. Rotten kids. Even when their novels boast sour-note clichés and turns of phrase (“If time flies when you’re having fun, it really flies when you’ve screwed up something big. Or when you throw your clock gets thrown out the window…”) that any self-respecting creative writing teacher would red pen in a minute; they still produce work that should shame James Patterson or the pabulum that passes for most Hollywood blockbusters. Maybe the creative writing teachers aren’t red penning the work of the younger generation because they’re too busy working on literary novels about the tortured affair they had with their creative writing teachers. Sorry, people, there’s only one Blue Angel by Francine Prose.

      Forget derivative literary pseudo-LOLITA wannabes. Ryan Mayers delivers the most truly original mystery I’ve read this year. Somebody give this young “poor college student studying math” (yes, math) “and education,” whose own bio states his wish to “eventually be able to warp the minds of the next generation as a teacher,” a MacArthur Fellowship. If you can take traditional nursery rhymes such as Old Mother Hubbard and turn the good bare-cupboard lady into the Heidi Fleiss of the imaginary parallel-Earth world of Breco, that’s talent.

       Detective John Monroe, a spiritual dead ringer for Mike Hammer or Andy Sipowicz---or so we think---uncovers a JFK-esque plot to assassinate the King during the King’s annual visit. When partner Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall, Dumpty’s not the only thing in Breco that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put back together again. It falls to John Monroe to make sure his good egg partner didn’t die in vain. However, something smells of rotten eggs in the state of Breco, and the corrupt odor just might come from Monroe himself. Although the “good cop gone bad” scenario is comfortably familiar, Mayers’ wicked, fresh imagination makes this edgy definitely-not-for-kids bedtime story succeed.