{"id":21190,"date":"2025-10-02T16:26:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T20:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21190"},"modified":"2025-10-02T16:26:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T20:26:34","slug":"mystery-explosion-by-ed-benjamin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21190","title":{"rendered":"‘Mystery Explosion,’ by Ed Benjamin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The mundane title<\/strong> should have tipped me off. Mystery Explosion<\/a><\/em> is actually a novella, the first installment in a series of four books (to date), entitled Bulverde Beat<\/em>, after the Texas community where the stories are set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main characters are Harry Miles, a private investigator, and Luke Remington, police detective, who sometimes hires Harry as a consultant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A female county prosecutor is killed in a heater explosion in her home. Harry is immediately suspicious \u2013 the \u201caccident\u201d was suspiciously timed, and he suspects the victim\u2019s husband from the get-go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the story proceeds (commendably) in proper procedural fashion, as Harry and Luke question various witnesses and suspects, gradually eliminating false assumptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t mind the story as such \u2013 I like the procedural approach, and this narrative seemed (to this amateur) relatively realistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My problem was with the writing. The author isn\u2019t a bad wordsmith, but he needs to learn to cut text. He talks too much \u2013 throws verbiage at an idea rather than selecting the exact words he wants. He runs up long lists of redundancies in some places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, he hasn\u2019t learned how to use quotation marks. Tip: When a character\u2019s speech goes on for several paragraphs, you omit the closing quotation marks at the ends of the interior paragraphs. This tips off your reader to the fact that the character has not stopped talking yet. It saves a whole lot of confusion.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A further sin is that the characters are almost never physically described.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mystery Explosion<\/em> wasn\u2019t awful, and it had the virtue of being pretty short. But I can\u2019t recommend it highly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The mundane title should have tipped me off. Mystery Explosion is actually a novella, the first installment in a series of four books (to date), entitled Bulverde Beat, after the Texas community where the stories are set. The main characters are Harry Miles, a private investigator, and Luke Remington, police detective, who sometimes hires Harry … Continue reading ‘Mystery Explosion,’ by Ed Benjamin<\/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":[5723,5722,5724],"class_list":["post-21190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-bulverde-beat","tag-ed-benjamin","tag-mystery-explosion"],"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\/21190","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=21190"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21193,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21190\/revisions\/21193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}