I get a lot of free e-books through online offers, as I’ve mentioned before. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, in these days of self-publishing, that a fair number of those books are unreadable. For one reason or another. Unless an author writes so egregiously that I can’t restrain my pen, I’ve taken to generally dropping these books and forgetting them. Nobody set me up as a judge of aspiring novelists.

I had dumped two books in a row in the aforementioned manner, before I picked up Steven Womack’s Fade Up From Black: The Return of Harry James Denton. I was delighted to encounter readable prose, and settled back to enjoy it.

Harry James Denton is, apparently, the hero of a private eye series which the author dropped for a while, and is now picking up again. Harry lives in Nashville, Tennessee. He and his partner built their investigative business up into a digital security company, and now they’re both multimillionaires. But Harry’s old girlfriend, with whom he had a passionate but volatile relationship, recently died of cancer, leaving behind their 15-year-old daughter. The girl has been living with her mother in Reno, but will now be moving to Nashville to live with Harry.

However, the day before he leaves for the funeral, Harry gets a visitor in his office. The man is Leo Walsh, who was briefly a celebrated novelist some years back. A series of bad decisions led him downhill, and now he’s teaching screenplay writing at a seedy local cinema school. Leo tells Harry he wants him to investigate a murder – his own murder.

Harry explains that he doesn’t really do private investigation anymore, though he keeps his license current. He has a lot on his plate and can’t take the case. Leo Walsh walks away disappointed. When Harry returns with his daughter a few days later, he’s shocked to learn that Leo’s body has been found beaten to death and left behind a dumpster.

Harry feels guilty about turning the man away. Learning that the police have made no headway, and aren’t even trying very hard, he decides to stretch his investigative muscles again.

As I mentioned, the prose in Fade Up From Black was pretty good. That’s always a plus. But it takes more than good prose to make a successful mystery story. I’d been reading a while when I realized that the narrative was moving at a snail’s pace. Many pages passed between actual plot developments. The author has a fascination with describing Nashville traffic, for instance.

When things finally do start happening, Harry seems to have lost more than a step as a PI. He gets an anonymous threat over his cell phone – a threat not only against him but against his friends and daughter. Yet he – although he is a multimillionaire and owns A FREAKING SECURITY COMPANY, just ignores it, not taking a minute to employ the resources with which he’s so richly supplied. And again, in the buildup to the final confrontation, he puts off calling on his highly capable friends.

There are a couple veiled political comments in the book, and I think it’s fair to conclude that the author is a lefty. However, he actually did a pretty good job of trying to be evenhanded.

But overall, Fade Up From Black was a disappointment, flaccid in plot and deficient in dramatic tension.