A Stranger Lies There: Stephen Santogrossi
By: Angela Longstreet | 05.29.07 | Fiction: Mysteries & Thrillers | Permalink | Digg this! | Save to del.icio.us
On a very hot morning in Southern California, Tim Ryder brings his coffee out to the front porch. Before he can take a sip, he sees the dead body of a young man laid out on his lawn.
Neither Tim nor his wire Deirdre have ever seen the man before, but the youth’s death stirs up their very different lives of twenty years earlier, when Tim was in college and Deirdre was a prisoner of drugs. Tim testified against a man, helping to give him a long term prison sentence. The man has just been released and Tim is afraid he means to have revenge.
I was excited to get my hands on a murder mystery piece and upon reading the insert found the story a bit typical however I figured that I would give it ago. After working my way through the first half of the book finding it exhaustingly long, I finally got to the good parts. My oh my suspense in the middle, the ‘who done its’ and the twists and turns in the plot were truly breathtaking. I found the first half of the book drawn out, too full of chatter than real story. It was as if Santogrossi decided to take his time writing the character profiles, it lacking any sort of real character development until the very end.
Santogrossi has a way with words and this is proven in his meticulous detail to the fronds of palm trees, to the twinkle in a star and the textures of the sand. He uses such simple things to distract us from the main story at hand because we just KNOW that a slip of paper or a matchbook may hold the key to the murderer’s location and motive. He teases us with further stories of both character pasts and that of almost all of the other main persons in the book. Who would have thought that tales of prison life would prove so useful to a murder mystery?
The middle of the tale sends us into a feeding frenzy begging that the last few pages will make it all just make sense. The ending read like forced rhythmic poetry, it was very rushed and it was almost as if Santogrossi decided that he suddenly now had a word count limit to his manuscript. I was HIGHLY disappointed at the ending while the whole time I was fed with so many other possibilities that would of made the story so much better. I would personally rip out the first half and the last six pages, yes he finished the end in six pages, and burn them before attempting to repair the disease that those pages inflicted upon the greatly written middle action and suspense section.
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Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur (May 15, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0312364415
ISBN-13: 978-0312364410