Susan Stoner’s third mystery in her turn of the 19th century series features undercover detective Sage Adair at the top of his game. A labor strike, a union leader framed for murder, a rag picker poet and collapsing city bridges in the Pacific Northwest makes a tasty stew of murder and mayhem. Stoner is a master at carving character with a few words and putting the reader in the midst of a setting real enough to make a person shiver from the falling rain. Throw in some frisky images and metaphors and Dry Rot can only be described as a darned good read.
Stoner’s works have yet to make it across the trestle of the main stream press and I am hard pressed to understand why. That eventuality will come, however, because to discover her books is to fall in love with them. To the timid book buyer, I can only say give her work a try. You’ll meet unique characters in a virtual world so historically authentic you can almost touch it. Her tale might not appeal to the libidos of teen age girls, like the Twilight Series, but it does invite rapid page turning as the rough and tumble characters, heroes and charlatans as alike, scramble to get the best of one another.
Susan Stoner’s detective series deserves to be read and, if read, will be thoroughly enjoyed. The New York Times Best Seller List be damned.
(Courtesy of Amazon.com)
