Jeff’s Reviews > A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing > Status Update

"The Mouth of the Tropics": 4/5 - A story about the conflict of studying versus protecting the Amazon--yes, please. Very evocative, immersive and vivid, but not much of a resolution.

"Tower Eight": 5/5 - this is one of the best short stories I've ever read--my review wouldn't do it justice. Reminds me a little of "The Last Rung on the Ladder."

Weed's ability to infuse a sentence with layers of meaning is like an artist creating a complex two-dimensional image with depth out of layers of paint:
"It must have been even better from his perspective, twenty or thirty feet above the snow, wind whistling around his ears, his shadow tracking across the dimpled slope like the shadow of a soaring bird, or an alter ego, or the final glimpse of a departing soul."

The dialogue here is impeccable. Like it would be harder to sustain disbelief than suspend it.

these shorts showcase how good a writer tim weed really is, almost hard to believe:

He made a show of putting the remaining ones back in his coat pocket, but his fist stayed closed when he took it out and I think he must have taken the extras, too. In the end, it probably didn’t matter.

"The Camp at Cutthroat Lake": 5/5 - saturated with a sense of lurking dread, this story relies on the symbolism of an otherwise innocuous fishing trip, and the subtle character development doled out sparingly across only a few pages. Impeccable pacing and foreshadowing, thought-provoking and vivid.