The Sandburg Connection

Mark De Castrique

ISBN: 978-1-59058-943-4

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Trade Paperback 288 pages

Price: $14.95

Reviewed by: Ron Smyth

The Sandburg Connection is the first book I have read by Mark de Castrique though he has written at least ten including five in the Buryin’ Barry series and two earlier efforts in the Sam Blackman series. The prose is smooth and unobtusive and he clearly understands the technique of plotting and how to keep things moving along.

It begins as a simple assignment to follow Professor Janice Wainwright, who is suing her doctor, and catch her in physical activities that undercut her claim. When she visits Connemara, Carl Sandburg’s home in Flat Rock N.C. Sam thinks he has his evidence until she is found, by him, semiconcious and bleeding at the top of Glassy Mountain. Her last words were “Wendy. It’s the verses. Sandburg’s verses”. An autopsy reveals painkillers in her blood and solid proof of the surgeon’s errors. Whatever compelled this woman to climb such an arduous trail must have been very important. The theft of some Sandburg volumes from the Wainwright farmhouse makes Sam wonder what Pulitzer Prize winner Sandburg might posess that results in multiple murders.

Of course Sam is an obvious suspect to the local authorities, but When the woman’s daughter tries to kill Sam he irrationally decides to help her. Sam is in the fortunate position of having a source of funds that means he can play Don Quixote when he wishes. It would appear this source is shady although details are in the earlier books that I haven’t read.

Nevertheless, by the end of the third chapter Sam has been a witness, a suspect and almost a corpse so the author is more than capable of keeping the action flowing. And Sam, a veteran Army CID member who lost a leg in Iraq has the potential to be an interesting lead character with his Do What Has To Be Done attitude.

Now a modern regional mystery, and I read a lot of them, needs a plot, a detailed setting in both place and time, and a lead character who could only truly exist in that setting. The stronger, the better. Ideally, like Tony Hillerman, the plot grows naturally only in that unique place and the detective would not be truly believable anywhere else. Could you really see Spenser operating on a Navajo Reservation or Nero Wolfe trying to solve Joe Leaphorn’s cases? But Sam’s potential as an interesting character is vitiated by the almost casual attitude that Mark De Castique takes to even the most important moral choices Sam makes. Late in the book the author sets Sam up in a plot to harm the villain i.e. Do What Has To Be Done and then has him make this essential decision in a single throwaway paragraph. How disappointing. And the only way I know the book is taking place in the south is Sam eating hushpuppies and drinking a mixed drink that is half sweetened and half unsweetened ice tea. The plot at least uses the Confederacy but the MacGuffin could have been almost anything and the setting need not be North Carolina although that does allow Sandburg to be involved. Usually an author who has done a considerable amount of research errs in trying to put too much of it in the book. De Castique is too experienced to make that mistake. If anything he goes too far the other way although we do learn at least some things about Carl Sandburg.

Next time I want more. I want to learn more about Sam as an individual and his partner Nakayla as well. More moral qualms for the leading character than a single paragraph can resolve, more reason to think that I’m in a unique rather than a generic setting and hopefully a plot that could only happen in North Carolina. The mystery here is solidly plotted and professionally competent but the mystery isn’t end the point in a regional mystery, it is merely the starting point, a framework which will be clad in the sounds, sights and smells of the locality. That is a weakness in this volume. Sam could be so much more than he is here if he wasn’t presented as just another standard flippant, wisecracking PI. And surely there are things that exist only in North Carolina that we can experience together. I’d like to spend some more time with him.

Copyright 2011 Ronald Smyth