In the second book of the Joe Boyd series, An Inconvenient Death, Joe, a police detective in the town of Culpepper, is camping with his family (apparently he’s a workaholic, and this is a good development). While his son is walking their new puppy, the dog locates a buried human skeleton. Although Joe calls the discovery in, he manages to convince his superior officer to let him continue his vacation, leaving his younger subordinate Hank to start the investigation on his own.

Hank proves to be very competent. Based on what remains of the clothing, along with a high school class ring found nearby, he manages to pinpoint the likely victim – a boy who worked in a local convenience store and vanished in 1988.

Meanwhile, in a writers’ group that meets at a local church, a couple female members are annoyed by one of the male members. He’s socially awkward and “creepy,” and he keeps bringing in pages from his work in progress – a book about how three high school boys murder a convenience store worker and hide his body in the woods.

G. K. Chesterton once said (I quote from memory), “There are two meanings to the word ‘good.’ If a man were to shoot his grandmother from a distance of 500 yards, I would call him a good shot. I would not necessarily call him a good man.”

There are two kinds of good book — a book that is morally good, or a book that is good in terms of the writing craft. An Inconvenient Death is morally good. Salutary virtues are praised and nobody uses a word harsher than “crap.” Even more admirably, it deals in a genuinely Christian way with the awkward issue of scandal in the church.

It is not, however, good in terms of writing. The author, like so many young authors, overwrites. He informs us what people are thinking and feeling without letting them reveal those thoughts and emotions through gesture and dialogue. He sometimes doubles his dialogue – first recounting a conversation, and then having that conversation repeated to another character in detail (this bores the reader). He tells us how people greet each other at the beginnings of conversations (also boring and unnecessary). There are grammar mistakes from time to time too.

Also, the suspense could have been ratcheted up considerably.

So, my bottom line is, I appreciate the effort to write a clean, uplifting mystery, but An Inconvenient Death wasn’t very well written.