Book Cover from Amazon
Southern Bound (Max Porter Mysteries #1) by Stuart Jaffe
BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON
When Max Porter discovers his office is haunted by the ghost of a 1940s detective, he does the only sensible thing … he starts a detective agency!
Thrust neck-deep into a world of old mysteries and dangerous enemies, he will face ghosts, witches, and curses. He will discover a world in which survival might be the easiest challenge. And he will do anything necessary to keep his wife and his life from falling away.
Real history meets the paranormal in this thrilling, suspenseful series!
MY REVIEW
Ok – After finishing the story, I re-looked at the title and it took on a dozen new meanings. Rarely have does a title fit a story this well.
The story is a research-mystery genre, with a little paranormal thrown in. I liked the character doing research in actual books, as well as internet, foot work, and face-to-face interviews. Slow in parts, because research is slow. Fast when a breakthrough happens. You feel like you are going step-by-step through the process with the researcher. No magic Google searches or wikipedia entries, the character needed to touch books not scanned onto the internet.
And because the story is research, the paranormal in a detective story works. Often, as the character trudged once again off to the library (which becomes a character in and of itself), you forget this world also has ghosts and witches – or the ghosts and witches feel the same as the employers and thugs, the world has them, not all are pleasant, and you still need to make a living.
I’ve been reading a lot of urban fantasy genre with mystery edges, and so I found the fact the romance was between two married people rediscovering their relationship after a rocky patch very refreshing and relaxing.
I really liked the POW history aspect. A must-read for anyone who likes mysteries and is from North Carolina. At the end of the story you want to visit all the places appearing in the book and also find out what parts were true and what were fiction.