What do you think?
Rate this book
Baltimore Blues
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 30, 2015
I found that this book is good if you're the kind of person who likes action movies for the action and couldn't care less about the plot or character depth. Lowell Ransom is bored with being a social worker in Baltimore so he decides to become a Private Investigator. His first call is from a woman named Doris who wants to see if her husband is cheating on her. Instead he finds the husband is involved with secret work with his employer, and from there it gets into a whole mess of discovering politics and backdoor dealings.
Lowell is just way too lucky as a character, things that should have gone horribly wrong or been a major obstacle end up working out because either he knows someone (thanks to being a former Vietnam vet) who can get him exactly what he needs (weapons, equipment, etc.), or someone else shows up at exactly the right time to save him when he's about to end up with a bullet in his brain. Never mind that he was lucky to manage to get his very first case to be one that ends up paying off very handsomely in the end so that his wife now has no reason to complain about his change in career. That's the factor that makes him less interesting, he's a beginning PI who only has his Army training from 20 years ago and not only manages to land a big case on the first try, but his plans almost never go wrong.
Really, this book is good for a quick read on the beach, and at least the descriptions of Baltimore and Washington DC are accurate for the time, but it's the kind of read where you don't really have to think about the plot, you just want to see some explosions.
Lowell is just way too lucky as a character, things that should have gone horribly wrong or been a major obstacle end up working out because either he knows someone (thanks to being a former Vietnam vet) who can get him exactly what he needs (weapons, equipment, etc.), or someone else shows up at exactly the right time to save him when he's about to end up with a bullet in his brain. Never mind that he was lucky to manage to get his very first case to be one that ends up paying off very handsomely in the end so that his wife now has no reason to complain about his change in career. That's the factor that makes him less interesting, he's a beginning PI who only has his Army training from 20 years ago and not only manages to land a big case on the first try, but his plans almost never go wrong.
Really, this book is good for a quick read on the beach, and at least the descriptions of Baltimore and Washington DC are accurate for the time, but it's the kind of read where you don't really have to think about the plot, you just want to see some explosions.
February 15, 2011
I was so disappointed in this book overall. It seems the author kept forgetting that the genre was mystery and not romance. There were so many scenes that really were not necessary to the premise of the storyline. I really loved the mystery part of story and how it had great twists and turns but was really turned off by the details of love making and drug use that just were not necessary to the book. I'm not a prude but truly found these forays into the personal details very distracting to the actual mystery and suspense of the novel.
March 7, 2011
Good mystery with lots of local Baltimore color and available FREE for the Nook.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews