Even though the failure of the email list meant that the announcement did not exactly spread far and wide, a nice little group assembled to listen to us two veterans of the Butterfly Lightning host slot as we belatedly celebrated Martin Luther King Day.
Preston Allen has a new self-published volume called Hoochie Mama (iUniverse, available through Amazon, etc.). He shared the beginning of it with us, and it was enough to make me snap up the only extra copy he had with him. Not many mystery stories lead off with ethical puzzles like this one does: "How can the father tell us don't kill when there's all that killing in the Bible?" But this is not your average mystery novel, and it promises to lead to places unknown. Maybe I'll say more about that when I get to the end. All I can tell you now is that the prologue achieves that balance of the abstract and the particular that is an earmark of a writer you can trust to draw you in and keep you going to the end.
My own reading was a recently revised "chapter" from my collection of stories about that guy (currently named Christopher Margin) who lives in his van, circa 1970. In this one his need for an income leads him to take a job driving a group of inner-city kids around to sell cookies. Sounds simple, but, as they say, "complications ensue." A closer encounter with one of the kids lets him see the economic realities of what they are doing more clearly than is good for him.
This was so much fun, I think we should plan now to celebrate the holiday next year in the same style.
- Steve Donachie