
It’s rare that I finish a book in a single day. Oh, it happens from time to time, but typically because I’m on a business trip – with the time at the terminal, the time on the plane, and the night at the hotel affording me the chance to put in a solid block of reading. I read Goodnight Irene like it was nothing. If you asked me what I did the day I read it, I’d hardly mention reading, as I was out and about enjoying the holidays: a rare breakfast out alone with my wife, some late shopping for those last minute gifts that feel suddenly necessary, some chores around the house. But tucked in there, I somehow stole enough moments with this book to burn through 248 pages. And let me tell you, as the page count dropped to the final forty or so, there was no way that I wasn’t finishing it.
Take Zelda Popkin’s flub of a book Dead Man’s Gift and pretend that it lived up to every last bit of promise: a swollen Mississippi River encroaching on the holdout contenders for a deadman’s will; said deadman offed under impossible circumstances; an unfathomable fire within the deluge just when you think things couldn’t get worse. Mix in some creeping horror a la Hake Talbot, the pell mell energy of the second half of Theodore Roscoe’s Murder on the Way, and the ambitious bravado of Paul Halter. Yes, Goodnight Irene is a hell of a read.
Continue reading “Goodnight Irene – James Scott Byrnside (2018)”