I have returned safely from my annual pilgrimage to Minot, North Dakota for Norsk Høstfest. I’d planned to post a report tonight, but my slow computer is taking time uploading my photos, and I want you to enjoy the full splendor and pageantry of the spectacle. So I’ll try to do that tomorrow.

I will tell you that it went very well, and I have only good things to say about the festival.

Tonight’s review, then, will be A New Prospect, by Wayne Zurl.

Sam Jenkins, our hero, is former New York City police detective, now retired the town of Prospect, in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. He’s found retirement a little boring, so when the current chief of police retires under pressure, Sam applies for the job, for which he’s (theoretically) overqualified. Obviously he doesn’t expect the kind of action he used to see in the Big Apple. Except that, on his very first day on the job, there’s a puzzling murder.

The victim is a rich local resident, a nasty drunk who was widely hated. He was stabbed to death in his folding chair, next to his vintage Rolls Royce, during a classic auto show. It soon becomes apparent that a lot of people – including the not-so-grieving widow – do not appreciate having an “outsider” investigating the murder, and pressure is put on Sam to hand the case off to the state police or the FBI. But this is just the sort of mystery Sam has always been best at, and he keeps at it.

The writing was okay. This is an older book, and I assume author Zurl had to actually satisfy a publisher’s proofreaders. But the book never really grabbed me. I thought Sam, as narrator, revealed a somewhat condescending attitude to the southern people he’s dealing with. Especially annoying was the heavy use of dialect in the dialogue. The occasional “y’all,” and such, is plenty to suggest an accent. You don’t have to spread it on thick.

All in all, I could take or leave A New Prospect.