{"id":19399,"date":"2024-03-04T20:05:13","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T01:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=19399"},"modified":"2024-03-04T20:05:13","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T01:05:13","slug":"fade-up-from-black-by-steven-womack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=19399","title":{"rendered":"‘Fade Up From Black,’ by Steven Womack"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I get a lot of free e-books<\/strong> through online offers, as I\u2019ve mentioned before. I guess it shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t restrain my pen, I\u2019ve taken to generally dropping these books and forgetting them. Nobody set me up as a judge of aspiring novelists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had dumped two books in a row in the aforementioned manner, before I picked up Steven Womack\u2019s Fade Up From Black: The Return of Harry James Denton<\/a><\/em>. I was delighted to encounter readable prose, and settled back to enjoy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019re both multimillionaires. But Harry\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s teaching screenplay writing at a seedy local cinema school. Leo tells Harry he wants him to investigate a murder \u2013 his own murder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harry explains that he doesn\u2019t really do private investigation anymore, though he keeps his license current. He has a lot on his plate and can\u2019t take the case. Leo Walsh walks away disappointed. When Harry returns with his daughter a few days later, he\u2019s shocked to learn that Leo\u2019s body has been found beaten to death and left behind a dumpster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harry feels guilty about turning the man away. Learning that the police have made no headway, and aren\u2019t even trying very hard, he decides to stretch his investigative muscles again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I mentioned, the prose in Fade Up From Black<\/em> was pretty good. That\u2019s always a plus. But it takes more than good prose to make a successful mystery story. I\u2019d been reading a while when I realized that the narrative was moving at a snail\u2019s pace. Many pages passed between actual plot developments. The author has a fascination with describing Nashville traffic, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 a threat not only against him but against his friends and daughter. Yet he \u2013 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\u2019s so richly supplied. And again, in the buildup to the final confrontation, he puts off calling on his highly capable friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a couple veiled political comments in the book, and I think it\u2019s fair to conclude that the author is a lefty. However, he actually did a pretty good job of trying to be evenhanded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But overall, Fade Up From Black<\/em> was a disappointment, flaccid in plot and deficient in dramatic tension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I get a lot of free e-books through online offers, as I\u2019ve mentioned before. I guess it shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t restrain my pen, I\u2019ve taken to generally … Continue reading ‘Fade Up From Black,’ by Steven Womack<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[5090,4257],"class_list":["post-19399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-fade-up-from-black","tag-steven-womack"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19399"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19401,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19399\/revisions\/19401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}