![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/rivercitypi.jpg\")
Well, of course, I bought this book after finishing To Rise Again at a Decent Hour<\/em><\/a> and jumped right into it. And, as I mentioned<\/a>, I finished it a week ago but am just now getting around to reviewing it. Which, if you’re sussing things out, means I have not finished a book in the interim as I mentioned it was still on the scanner. Hopefully, soon, I will have something else on the scanner, or I am not going to make 100 books this year. I guess I have only done this seven times in the last fifteen years, so it’s not that common, and the “goal” listed on the inherited spreadsheet is to finish 70 books a year, which I am better at.<\/p>\nANYWAY, this book is part of the Harbison series, but only in a cousinary way. The first seven books, ending with The Killing at Cottage Farm<\/em>, which I finished in January<\/a>, deals with Chet Harbison in northwestern Jefferson County where I grew up (albeit seventy and more years before the Noggle boys ever hit Murphy or House Springs). This book is set several decades later in Cape Girardeau and features Reese “Red” Harbison, who was mentioned in the previous book as a boy who moves with his family when their farm fell on hard times. Now grown up, he’s a World War II veteran coming home for his mother’s funeral and to take over the auto body paint and supply company where he used to work. After he finds a stolen car using the tag from an abandoned and neglected dog, he decides to also be a private investigator. But he’s accused of a murder which harms his business, and he discovers that one of the high school teachers has short eyes and has been drugging and taking advantage of high school students, and he resolves to take care of the latter while kind of investigating the former.<\/p>\n Wilder shifts from the third-person perspective to the first-person with this book, and between that and his greater experience with novels make for a bit better of a read. The book still focuses a lot on setting the stage, talking about the characters, and capturing the sense of southeast Missouri in 1961 which makes the resolution of the plots a little quick and pat. And, boy howdy, I might have mentioned previously that the books could have used another set of eyes on them, and this goes doubly true for this book. In addition to frequent problems with quotation marks, such as breaking in quotations at nouns of direct address, the last chapter misspells two of the main characters’ names. I offered in 2024 to act as a proofreader for him. I need to reach out to him again with the same offer, making clear I’m not looking to charge him corporate rates.<\/p>\n Our conversation at the book signing led me to a couple insights about publishing. He mentioned that his covers and typesetting cost him about $400 a book (I hope that was not a trade secret). Boy, howdy. The cover of John Donnelly’s Gold<\/em> cost me $300, and I ordered 50 print copies to send to bloggers, papers, and magazines when I first published it. I will never make that out no matter how many authors I sell them to when I’m ostensibly at ABC Books to buy their<\/em> books–and Wilder, I believe, bought a copy of John Donnelly’s Gold<\/em> (or so he said he would–I guess I will see when I go to buy the copy of the Frankl book I couldn’t find at Barnes & Noble<\/a>).<\/p>\n But, despite its typos and seeming occasional anachronisms, I like the Harbison series and will pick up the next. In December, maybe?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, of course, I bought this book after finishing To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and jumped right into it. And, as I mentioned, I finished it a week ago but am just now getting around to reviewing it. Which, if you’re sussing things out, means I have not finished a book in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35530,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35529\/revisions\/35530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}