Soldier's Gap

Rating:
Summary: Enthusiastically recommended reading for mystery buffs
Review: Dave Schwinghammer's Soldier's Gap is a intriguing and entertaining mystery centering on the murder of James Egge, a local high school principal. Arriving on the scene of a gruesomely bludgeoned corpse, Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins has a psychic experience of the murdered victim's life. Now Dave Jenkins has a unwilling but personal stake in searching for the killer, through small-town politics, trailer park kids, and an illicit love triangle. Meanwhile, the night deputy and Mescalero Apache Mingo Jones wants to hold a ghost medicine ceremony for his former small-town friend Egge, to ensure that Egge's soul is not trapped between the Shadow World and the Land of Ever Summer. Soldier's Gap is enthusiastically recommended reading for mystery buffs!

Rating:
Summary: An Onion Worth Peeling
Review: I was glad when Jerry Egge was murdered at the end of the first chapter of The Soldiers Gap, because the guy was a whiny irritant. I was delighted to find out that he also irritated almost everyyone in his small, midwestern town - from his boss, who wanted to fire him; to his wife, who slept with his boss; to his children, who really weren't his.

Everyone, it seems, had a reason to want Jerry Egge dead. That makes a fun murder investigation, especially when the suspects are of the quirky Twin Peaks variety.

The book sets up its own unique world, and like any travels into an exotic location, it takes a while to get your bearings. A lot of the characters are quirky - in fact, almost everyone in this book is quirky - variety - from the teenage sexpots to the mystical Native American deputy.
It took me a while to get into the rhymth of the book and accept it on its own terms, but that's also the case of traveling to many foreign countries where I eventually had the time of my life.

The author is, his bio tells us, a long-time miswestern high school teacher, and he is adroit at capturing the smouldering undercurrents in an apparently placid small town. This ain't Mayberry and the head of the investigation ain't Andy Griffith (Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins arrives on the scene of the murder with a hangover). Jenkins, it is obvious from the start, has his own demons, and they become more apparent as the murder investigation goes along. In fact, solving the murder is only one of the many mysteries in this layered book. It's an onion well worth peeling.

Rating:
Summary: I Usually Don't Read Mysteries
Review: If you're a fan of the Coen Brothers' vison of the Midwest, if you've enjoyed Pete Hautman's mysteries, if you like the snappy dailogue of Janet Evanovich, then you'll get a good read from Dave Schwinghammer. Dave Jenkins, a rough-around-the-edges deputy, finds himself baffled not only by the murders that keep happening in his town, but by a voice from beyond the grave that scares him as much as it seems to be trying to help him. He's getting to the bottom of this case, despite being bogged down by petty small-town politics, rampant juvenile delinquency, and trouble on the job that's a potent mixture of professional jealousy and the strain of finding himself at the apex of a love triangle with his boss's daughter and the high school crush he never quite stopped pining for. Soldier's Gap is a smorgasboard of a book, full of quirky yet entirely true-to-life characters that offers humor, mystery, suspense and romance. It's a fun read.

Rating:
Summary: quirky, entertaining and fun...
Review: In his first at bat, Dave Schwinghammer offers us a mystery with a twist. To say that this is the most interesting, quirky, entertaining and fun mystery that I have read in a long time would be an understatement. Things start off very quickly when the local high school principal of a small town in Minnesota is found bludgeoned to death. Principal Egge is not very well liked, and almost everyone becomes a suspect. Events snowball out of control, and soon we have another murder, some poisoned dogs, slit tires, threatening graffiti several assault victims, and some unsettled spirits, to boot.

The plot of Soldier's Gap is very well done and when you think you've got everything figured out, you'll still be missing some key pieces. But what drives this successful novel are the characters-they're a scream! They show us all their quirks in a way that could only be observed in a small town. First, Deputy Jenkins is a nice enough guy, but seems to be living under a cloud. There's Sheriff Kline who smokes and eats too much, tells horrible jokes, and is a walking heart attack. Also on staff is half-breed Mingo Jones, who is trying hard to reconnect to his Native side. There is a city council woman who tries to run the town like she ran her 3rd grade classroom. Add to this mix a superintendent of schools with the morals of an ally cat, and a host of disaffected teens who grew up in dysfunctional families, and are now pretty dysfunctional themselves.

But what makes Soldier's Gap even more entertaining is Schwinghammer's genius at turning a phrase and his word play. He describes someone looking like "the cat that ate a very expensive South American macaw." Something else is "dead as disco." It makes for hysterical reading!

I am very impressed with Schwinghammer's first effort, but it leaves me rather unsettled. This is a book that I heard about on Amazon, but I don't think it's had many mainstream reviews. Yet, it ranks up there with the best that I've read in the last several years. How many other fabulous books are out there that never get reviewed by national sources? And how many more never get published? I hope that this author publishes his next book sooner, rather than later.

Rating:
Summary: quirky, entertaining and fun...
Review: In his first at bat, Dave Schwinghammer offers us a mystery with a twist. To say that this is the most interesting, quirky, entertaining and fun mystery that I have read in a long time would be an understatement. Things start off very quickly when the local high school principal of a small town in Minnesota is found bludgeoned to death. Principal Egge is not very well liked, and almost everyone becomes a suspect. Events snowball out of control, and soon we have another murder, some poisoned dogs, slit tires, threatening graffiti several assault victims, and some unsettled spirits, to boot.

The plot of Soldier's Gap is very well done and when you think you've got everything figured out, you'll still be missing some key pieces. But what drives this successful novel are the characters-they're a scream! They show us all their quirks in a way that could only be observed in a small town. First, Deputy Jenkins is a nice enough guy, but seems to be living under a cloud. There's Sheriff Kline who smokes and eats too much, tells horrible jokes, and is a walking heart attack. Also on staff is half-breed Mingo Jones, who is trying hard to reconnect to his Native side. There is a city council woman who tries to run the town like she ran her 3rd grade classroom. Add to this mix a superintendent of schools with the morals of an ally cat, and a host of disaffected teens who grew up in dysfunctional families, and are now pretty dysfunctional themselves.

But what makes Soldier's Gap even more entertaining is Schwinghammer's genius at turning a phrase and his word play. He describes someone looking like "the cat that ate a very expensive South American macaw." Something else is "dead as disco." It makes for hysterical reading!

I am very impressed with Schwinghammer's first effort, but it leaves me rather unsettled. This is a book that I heard about on Amazon, but I don't think it's had many mainstream reviews. Yet, it ranks up there with the best that I've read in the last several years. How many other fabulous books are out there that never get reviewed by national sources? And how many more never get published? I hope that this author publishes his next book sooner, rather than later.

Rating:
Summary: Strange happenings in a weird Minnesota, Town
Review: Little Falls, Minnesota, author Schwinghammer spent many years as an English and
Social Studies teacher in junior and senior high schools. It shows. Soldier's Gap is a
well-written, neatly organized work of crime fiction. It is complex, with a lot of
characters. They all live in and around a small town somewhere in Minnesota, but make
no mistake, this is most definitely not Lake Wobegon.

The town itself, Soldier's Gap, takes some getting used to. Most of the characters take
some getting used to. Everything is just a little bit out of whack here, especially the small
police force. Take Mingo, the night duty deputy. He's a Mescalaro Apache and he
sometimes dresses the part. On duty. He wants to hold a ghost medicine ceremony for
the deceased. The sheriff is way overweight, smokes, chews, and eats all the wrong
things. He's ripe for a heart attack or a recall petition very soon. The sheriff is sliding
into depression because important people in town are working to get the Deputy Sheriff,
Dave Jenkins, protagonist of this story, to run against him in the next election and the
mayor is extremely meddlesome. Jenkins is everything the Sheriff is not, plus he's sort of
going with volunteer fireperson, Annie, the Sheriff's daughter. Jenkins also has visions.

Dave Jenkins is very friendly with a teenager who appears to know more about everything
that's going on than anyone. There are a raft of other teenagers surging in and out of the
story, who interact with many of the adults in sometimes strange and mysterious ways. In
this book you'll get murder rustling, inter-cop-agency byplay, sex, teenaged angst,
alcoholism and drug use, and a flickering look at a different dimension. None of these
are fun topics, but the author is able to balance them with a particularly tongue-in-cheek
attitude, some outrageous activities and some snappy dialogue. Soldier's Gap is not a
town you'd want to live in, but it would be an interesting place to visit. The book is too
long but well-written, once you get comfortable with the characters.

Rating:
Summary: Schwinghammer ?Nails It?
Review: Schwinghammer's story takes place in the "fictional" town of Soldier, Minnesota. "Fictional" - that's the most amazing thing about the book to me because Schwinghammer makes Soldier seem so real I can not only see it, I can smell it. In some ways Soldier's Gap is a traditional "who-done-it" mystery, but in so many other ways it's anything but a traditional mystery. Deputy County Sheriff, David Jenkins, is confronted with the biggest case of his young career, the murder of high school principal Jerry Egge. Along with his partners in crime-solving, "Night-Deputy" Mingo - a Mescalero Appache, and Lucille - a newly hired assistant with a weight problem, Jenkins must methodically sift through a maze of confusing evidence/clues and confront a plethora of possible suspects. Compounding the situation, or maybe helping the situation - I'm not sure which, Jenkins experiences episodic "visions" in which he catches glimpses of key events in Jerry Egge's life. At times these visions help steer Jenkins in the direction of the killer and at other times they only serve to make the case more confusing. Normally I'm not a fan of para-psychological stuff but somehow Schwinghammer makes it work for me. What I like best about the book are the characters. Jenkins and Mingo are kind of a laid-back, modern day version of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Lucille is surprisingly, yet believably, competent. And the endless stream of possible suspects ranging from the school superintendent to a bizarre assortment of teenagers are just so quirky that you can't help but get wrapped up in them.

Schwinghammer does a beautiful job of keeping the story line moving and a masterful job of pulling it all together at the end. About the only thing I didn't like about the book was the individual Chapter Titles and associated quotes/captions - after a while I just stopped paying attention to them. Over the past two months I've read Soldier's Gap and three "best-sellers" by well-established authors. It's no contest - Soldier's Gap is by far the best book of the lot.

Rating:
Summary: Schwinghammer ¿Nails It¿
Review: Schwinghammer's story takes place in the "fictional" town of Soldier, Minnesota. "Fictional" - that's the most amazing thing about the book to me because Schwinghammer makes Soldier seem so real I can not only see it, I can smell it. In some ways Soldier's Gap is a traditional "who-done-it" mystery, but in so many other ways it's anything but a traditional mystery. Deputy County Sheriff, David Jenkins, is confronted with the biggest case of his young career, the murder of high school principal Jerry Egge. Along with his partners in crime-solving, "Night-Deputy" Mingo - a Mescalero Appache, and Lucille - a newly hired assistant with a weight problem, Jenkins must methodically sift through a maze of confusing evidence/clues and confront a plethora of possible suspects. Compounding the situation, or maybe helping the situation - I'm not sure which, Jenkins experiences episodic "visions" in which he catches glimpses of key events in Jerry Egge's life. At times these visions help steer Jenkins in the direction of the killer and at other times they only serve to make the case more confusing. Normally I'm not a fan of para-psychological stuff but somehow Schwinghammer makes it work for me. What I like best about the book are the characters. Jenkins and Mingo are kind of a laid-back, modern day version of the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Lucille is surprisingly, yet believably, competent. And the endless stream of possible suspects ranging from the school superintendent to a bizarre assortment of teenagers are just so quirky that you can't help but get wrapped up in them.

Schwinghammer does a beautiful job of keeping the story line moving and a masterful job of pulling it all together at the end. About the only thing I didn't like about the book was the individual Chapter Titles and associated quotes/captions - after a while I just stopped paying attention to them. Over the past two months I've read Soldier's Gap and three "best-sellers" by well-established authors. It's no contest - Soldier's Gap is by far the best book of the lot.

Rating:
Summary: Reality and Mysticism uniquely blended.........
Review: Soldier's Gap is an amazingly intricate tale that combines reality and mysticism in a unique blend that draws the reader in and then pushes your imagination to accept them both.
The story begins with a vicious murder of a high school principal and the list of suspects begins to increase exponentially. When Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins begins to have experiences that can only originate from "the other side" , he is not sure how to handle it. He is not even sure that he should tell anyone, it might damage his credibility and reputation. The night deputy, Mingo Jones is a Mescalero Apache and more open to mystical experiences, as well as much more laid back about life in general. They work together to discover the murderer............and then more murders begin to take place.
The story takes place in a small town that is so real that you would swear you would recognize the town of Soldiers Gap immediately if you drove through it. The people are fully authentic and unique. The humor that runs through the book is heart felt and keeps it from being to dark.
Dave Schwinghammer has created a small town with all the current day realities, brushed it with a bit of TWIN PEAKS freakiness and created a murder mystery that will keep you reading with an intriguing desire to figure out who is behind the murders before the Sheriff's department does.