{"id":6510,"date":"2017-04-10T07:30:18","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T11:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6510"},"modified":"2017-04-10T07:30:18","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T11:30:18","slug":"eds-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6510","title":{"rendered":"*****Ed’s Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bookstore\"

photo: Kate Mereand-Sinha, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Russel D. McLean \u2013 Jen Carter, the young Glaswegian bookstore clerk who narrates this book, makes one tiny mistake at the novel\u2019s outset.<\/p>\n

When she comes home late at night to find her apartment broken into, she searches the place, holding a kitchen knife. She panics when the hall closet door opens and the person inside stumbles out onto her knife. Her boyfriend Ed has just stabbed himself. And now he\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n

Confused and wracked with guilt, she compounds her dilemma. Instead of calling the police, she calls Ed\u2019s nerdy roommate Dave. Dave gets into the spirit of concealment and, while Jen sleeps, he dismembers the corpse to make it easier to dispose of. He even cleans up. After that, there\u2019s no going back, no possibility of bringing in the cops after all. Dave and Jen deposit poor Ed\u2014that is, the pieces of him\u2014in a remote stretch of Loch Lomond.<\/p>\n

A closer examination of Jen\u2019s messy hall closet reveals what Ed was doing in there. He\u2019d concealed two duffel bags among her disorderly belongings. One contains an enormous stash of money and the other an enormous stash. Dave takes the drugs and Jen takes the cash. Why not, really? Really? And the hunt is on. Glasgow\u2019s crime lords want their money and their drugs, and soon the cops are on Jen\u2019s trail too.<\/p>\n

Though the body count is high, McLean writes this first-person story with a light touch and a bit of heartbroken bemusement, if those two words can live in the same sentence. In Jen, McLean has created an appealing protagonist, with a strong and consistent voice.<\/p>\n

Jen can\u2019t understand how her relatively orderly life has gotten so out of control and never expects to have the resources, internal or otherwise, to foil the determined criminals, led by the evil old man, Solomon Buchan. Nevertheless, she keeps trying to rise to the occasion.<\/p>\n

Though you may see some of the plot twists coming, and some may not bear close examination, the writing is so silky smooth it focuses your attention on whether Jen can slip out of trouble again and how she will try to do it.
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By Russel D. McLean \u2013 Jen Carter, the young Glaswegian bookstore clerk who narrates this book, makes one tiny mistake at the novel\u2019s outset. When she comes home late at night to find her apartment broken into, she searches the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****Ed's Dead - In Glasgow, a bookstore clerk is up against the crime bosses. Humor & mayhem.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,53,40,126],"tags":[949,950,678,948,817],"class_list":["post-6510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-criminal","category-fiction","category-reading-2","tag-eds-dead","tag-glasgow","tag-murder","tag-russel-d-mclean","tag-tartan-noir"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1H0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6512,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6510\/revisions\/6512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}