Reviews for Tilt-a-Whirl

The average rating for Tilt-a-Whirl based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-01 00:00:00 Brooke James Rating: 3.75* of five The Publisher Says: There isn't much sun in the fun when a billionaire real estate tycoon is found murdered on the Tilt-A-Whirl at a seedy seaside amusement park in the otherwise quiet summer tourist town of Sea Haven. John Ceepak, a former MP just back from Iraq, has just joined the Sea Haven police department. The job offer came from an old army buddy who hoped to give Ceepak at least a summer's worth of rest and relaxation to help him forget the horrors of war. Instead, Ceepak will head up the murder investigation. He is partnered with Danny Boyle, a 24-year-old part-time summer cop who doesn't carry a gun and only works with the police by day so he has enough pocket money left over to play with his beach buddies at night. In the first novel in a new series written in the spirit of Carl Hiaasen's work, the Tilt-A-Whirl murder pushes Ceepak's deep sense of honor and integrity to the limits, as unexpected twists and turns keep the truth spinning wildly in every direction. My Review: A first-person narrative by the brilliant, damaged sleuth's awestruck sidekick. A murder richly deserved, a plot cleverly sewn to established behaviors of irreproachable characters, and a very dark and twisted resolution that provides restitution for many past wrongs, all for the price of an insalata caprese on a baguette with taro chips. I started reading this free Kindle edition this afternoon, nursing a sore back and a bad mood. I stopped a few minutes ago, drew a deep breath, and said, "golly gee willikers, that was a corking experience!" (Ceepak rubbed off on me a little. It's only temporary. I hope.) I was rather constantly reminded that Ceepak was modeled on Sherlock Holmes, in fact a wee bit heavy-handedly (the cigarette butt, the musical obsession, the lighthouse), but honestly it never made the story less enveloping. The town and the townie-sidekick made me appreciate Ceepak's character's Sherlockian traits. The more Danny, out narrator, talks, the more Ceepak learns and, importantly, teaches. The specific information Ceepak seeks about the locations of stuff around the little resort town is less important than is the lesson that Danny is being offered at every step. It's so well-done that I suspect readers can whip right past that piece of subtext and lose no speck of pleasure in following Ceepak around as he pulls threads and worrys knots and always, always obeys his orders. Even when they come from people who have no idea what they're doing. The crime scene team at the scene of the murder is led by a revolting slob instead of a brilliant, world-renowned forensic scientist, who happens to be away on vacation when this crime is committed...the murder of a billionaire. Hard luck! It's so awful how things don't happen the right way, although the sloppy lead forensic guy probably gets a come-uppance offstage. Which kinda sucks, I'd really have enjoyed seeing him suffer...though I have some hopes he'll reappear to be a thorn in the side of our Dudley Dooright detective, this shell-shocked love child of Sherlock and Adrian Monk. I'm all ready to be a big fan. I'm hoping I'll be as happy after I read the next one. Because I read this on the !*&$^^!%%#% Kindle, I can't quote the nice, dry asides and observations that Danny, our Watson-meets-Archie Goodwin, makes, but I smiled a lot, chuckle a good bit, and laughed out loud at least three times. Yeah, four stars. That's fair. The extra fractions of a star get deducted for a few small breaks, like an attitude shift on Danny's part that goes from up to down to up again a bit too quickly; the resolution of the original red herring being a smidge on the done-and-dusted side; and a bit at the end with Ceepak doing something I found, well, forced and unnecessary. None of which should even slow you down in your sprint to the Kindle store to spend a *whopping* ninety-nine cents to procure your lease on access to the file. Five hours happily spent making a new bestie? For a lousy buck? Be a devil, risk it! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-15 00:00:00 Kenton Sumner If someone combined the DNA of Captain America and Dudley Do-Right to create a superior human being, then John Ceepak would probably be the result. And then we would have to rise up and slay him for making the rest of us look so bad. Ceepak was with the military police in the army, but a bad tour in Baghdad has left him with a phobia about driving. He's now a police officer in a vacation resort town called Sea Haven where a young part-time cop and local boy named Danny Boyle is assigned as his partner, but Danny's main job is really just acting as Ceepak's chauffer. Ceepak and Danny are having some breakfast and getting ready to start a day investigating crimes like the theft of a tricycle when a screaming young girl covered in blood starts running down the street. Her father has just been shot and killed at a nearby amusement park, and when it turns out that he was one of the richest men in America, Sea Haven finds itself in the center of a media frenzy as the cops try to solve the crime. The main selling point for this one is the Ceepak character. It's apparent early that Ceepak is a good guy. Not just a good guy like, "Sure I'll help you move." or "Yeah, I'll come bail you out even though it's 2 AM on Christmas morning.", but a good guy in the sense that an Eagle Scout would look like a tweaker in a motorcycle gang by comparison. Ceepak is polite and courteous to everyone and doesn't lie or swear. He strictly follows rules and procedures, and he's such a devoted cop that his idea of a good time is watching forensic shows on the Discovery Channel. If he gives you his word, it's as good as money in the bank. Sounds like he'd be a self-righteous bore, right? That's the neat part. He isn't. The story is told in first person narration from Danny's point of view, and it's his voice that makes this work. Danny's a nice guy, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He's the kind of likeable goof hanging around his home town that would normally be content to just coast along with dead end jobs and drinking beers with his friends, and Ceepak could run circles around him mentally or physically. Instead, Ceepak treats him with respect, tries to teach him police work without being a pompous jerk about it and generally just encourages Danny to be a better person by example. It's because he never acts like he's better than anyone else while being better than everyone else that makes what could be an annoying character more inspirational than pain-in-the-ass. Plus, when we learn Ceepak's tragic past, you realize that this isn't a guy who's so good because he was raised on a farm in Smallville, Kansas, by Ma and Pa Kent. This is a guy who consciously decided to be this way and holds himself to such a high standard because he wants to make things better for others. That also cuts down on the potential goody two-shoes factor. All in all, this kind of reminded me of a TV series that would be like something you'd see on the USA Network. You've got a quirky but likeable main character and his sidekick solving crimes that are just dark enough to give it some gravity, but not so grim that you feel like sticking your head in the oven. Lightweight, but fun and entertaining enough that I'll check out more in the series at some point.