Rogue - Frederick Ramsay

Another entertaining Ike Schwartz mystery. I like how the author takes his story around and about a little, so that as a reader the story is unpredictable. I'm not in law enforcement, but from watching shows like Forensic Files that summarize real investigations, it seems that that is very true to life in an investigation - there are a lot of twists and turns, and some dead ends, before the case gets solved. I also like how Mr. Ramsay sometimes inserts an amusing fictional story within the story, and I enjoyed the short story included in this book. I really like the character of Ike Schwartz so I was really happy to be able to read this book through NetGalley, although now I am all caught up on the series and I'll have to wait impatiently for the next installment. Luckily Mr. Ramsay seems very prolific so I hope I won't have to wait too long.

One thing I have to mention again is the lack of proofreading. Poisoned Pen Press, the publishing company, has a really cool logo that I just noticed for the first time on The Eye of the Virgin, and they are obviously dedicated to publishing good authors, so I am hoping that the NetGalley version was an uncorrected proof and that most of these errors got caught before publication. I have worked as a proofreader before and it can be a very hard and thankless job, and it's something a lot of smaller publishing companies don't think they can afford, but the pervasive typos really bug me so I hope they can fix the issue. The typos (missing quotation marks, misplaced commas, incorrect words such as "watched" for "watch," etc.) mar an otherwise very entertaining series that I have really come to love since I discovered it earlier this year.

As for this month's theme, well, this is another book that isn't too related, but I am determined to make it so, so here goes. In this book, it's not a spoiler to say that Ike was married before and his wife was killed, or that Ike's current love interest is in mortal danger in this book. Nat Wills was married four times, and his first two wives died young and rather suddenly. All of his wives were fellow performers. His first wife died at age 30, of an unspecified medical condition she had apparently had for some time, and his second wife died suddenly at age 29 of heart disease. He even mentioned this in an interview given when he was married to his third wife, saying he had been lucky in his career but not in his marriages, as his previous wives had died young. He later caused a scandal by apparently cheating on wife #3 with wife #4, which caused an alimony battle, but that's another blog entry.