Losing Sleep Over a Book

I found myself up waaay past my bedtime the other night, reading until my internal clock was chiming the early hours: one, two, three... It had been a long time since a murder mystery kept me up past midnight.

I was reading True Crime by Alan Gold (aka Ed Goldberg), and loving every minute of it.

Which, in a way, is surprising, because roughly 99.9 % of the books I read are by female authors. And Ed is most definitely male. He couldn't pass in drag. He doesn't have a gender-free voice. The lead characters in the books I read are roughly 85% female. Ed's protagonist, newspaper journalist Lou Tedesco, is a guy, plain and simple.

And the thing that kept me reading up until 3 am, when if I were in my right mind I've had conked out by 10? Not that it is based on a real crime on the Oregon coast. No. It was the plot. The voice. The details. The in-jokes (the character's editor/publisher is Blanche Perry--is Ed Goldberg a Spiderman fan?). The action that keeps right on going up until the final wrap and "the end."

It's not quite hardboiled. Definitely not soft. Redolent of golden age mysteries while as modern as Reginald Hill. Full of obscure references and those not so obscure: "Baseball been berry berry good to me." Brain candy. Yum.