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The Blue Journal Reviewed By Wally Wood of Bookpleasures.com
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Wally Wood

Reviewer Wally Wood: Wally is an editor and writer, has published three novels, Getting Oriented:A Novel about Japan, The Girl in the Photo and Death in a Family Business. He obtained his MA in creative writing in 2002 from the City University of New York and has worked with a number of authors as a ghostwriter and collaborator.

With an extensive background in a variety of business subjects, his credits include twenty-one nonfiction books. He spent twenty-five years as a trade magazine reporter and editor and has been a volunteer writing and business teacher in state and federal prisons for more than twenty years. He has finished his fourth novel and has translated a collection of Japanese short stories into English.



 
By Wally Wood
Published on February 18, 2015
 

Author: L.T. Graham

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

ISBN: 978-1-63388-060-3



Follow Here To Purchase The Blue Journal: A Detective Anthony Walker Novel

Author: L.T. Graham

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

ISBN: 978-1-63388-060-3


The first sentence of The Blue Journal: A Detective Anthony Walker Novel by L.T. Graham is naked foreshadowing: "There was no reason for Elizabeth Knoebel to suspect that this was going to be the last day of her life." In fact, by the end of Chapter 1, we've seen Elizabeth be shot in the head by "the murderer."

Elizabeth was a lovely, sexy psychopath, wife of a cold New York surgeon. She'd been seducing the men in her husband's marriage therapy group and been describing the encounters on her laptop. These reflect her contempt for the men who she never names: "In the end, the greatest aphrodisiac for a man is the pleasure he thinks he has given his partner. This is the way to own him . . ." "Confident men are often attractive men, a combination that makes them the easiest to seduce . . ." "T proved to be an easy seduction. He's the sort of man who needs to feel he's in charge, the easiest sort to manipulate . . ." Unfortunately for the novel's plausibility, Elizabeth seems to be pure evil. We never understand (or can infer) why she, who has looks, money, and an ability to write porn, should be hell bent on destroying other people's lives.

What this means for Anthony Walker, formerly a New York cop, now a Darien, CT, detective, is that he has a plethora of suspects. Just about everybody who has had any contact with Elizabeth has a reason to kill her. The first challenge is to identify the men she's written about, which turns out to be a fairly simple matter. But then there are other potential suspects: the therapist who is leading the marriage therapy group for the husbands and the wives, the town's First Selectman, the wives of the men Elizabeth has seduced, her surgeon husband.

It means the novel is a puzzle that Walker has to solve. Readers who enjoy solving (or at least following along as the detective solves) a complex mystery will have a lot of fun with The Blue Journal. Other readers may be put off by the shifts in point of view and by actions of characters who have clearly never read or watched a mystery: "[Randi, the therapist] wanted to tell Walker about the anonymous note, about the threatening phone call she had just receive, about her fears concerning several of her patients and Elizabeth Knoebel. But not yet, she decided. Not yet." To Graham's credit, she does not do what inexperienced mystery writers do when a character withholds information from the detective; she doesn't kill Randi off in the next chapter.

This is also a book for readers who enjoy a passage from the journal like: "Oddly, there are very few men I have ever known who have the same curiosity about the physiology of the vagina that they have for their own equipment. They tend to view a woman's pussy as a goal to be achieved rather than part of a process to be enjoyed . . . " Reportedly Graham is working on another Anthony Walker novel and will, with The Blue Journal experience behind her, the challenges of point of view, motivation, and character development that limit this first effort.