The Freshour Cylinders

Rating:
Summary: I stayed up all night to finish this book!
Review: Speer Morgan's latest novel, The Freshour Cylinders is the most captivating book I've read in a long time. It's an edge-of-your-seat mystery that includes a steamy romance and a great deal of fascinating history. All of the characters, from the protagonist, Tom Freshour (who some may remember as the strong silent orphan in The Whipping Boy) to the malfunctioning typewriter with a propensity for throwing itself off the desk are so skillfully detailed that they are simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking.

Tom Freshour is still strong and somewhat stoic in this book but has acquired an edge of that wry recklessness that tranforms action hero into legend. In this intriguing account of a newly discovered Indian burial mound and the murders that surround it, Morgan plunges us into the gripping history of 1930's Arkansas and Oklahoma and the drama of Freshour's own struggles with old ghosts and new challenges. Beyond the pleasure of a smart mystery, The Freshour Cylinders offers a moving story a man dealing with problems that span the personal and the political. You won't be able to put it down!

Rating:
Summary: One Really! Good Book.
Review: This book is entertaining, well-written, informative, well-plotted, sexy, and with an intrigueing cast of characters. As an anthropologist who once lived in Oklahoma, I appreciate how well it captures both the ethos of the area, and the issues of contemporary cultural interactions and archaeology that it deals with. In addition to all this, one of the best things about The Freshour Cylinders is the author's gentle and perceptive portrayals of human, especially male/female, interaction. It is rare to find a book that is so enjoyable on so many levels. It's fun to share a good thing: I want this book to be read.

Rating:
Summary: A vivid and beautifully written novel
Review: What a fine book The Freshour Cylinders is! It was the kind of reading experience that peopled my daydreams and nightdreams with vivid characters in exquisite detail. I felt like a time-traveller, transported to an exotic location, immersed in a time and place that, before this book, had little clarity to me. I have nothing but praise for this book -- it was thoroughly enjoyable and having to put it down put me in a bad mood. It's a book to savor for its splendid characters, dead-on dialogue, cinemascope descriptions of place and atmosphere, and driving plot. It's the kind of unbelieveable story that becomes completely believeable in the expert telling. I couldn't predict where I was being taken, like being driven through the Winding Stair Mountains in heavy fog, and I was thankful that a writer with unerring skill was at the wheel. Speer Morgan has an unfailing and incredible sense of historical accuracy. I was completely convinced that these characters were real. In addition to the pleasures of pure storytelling and exotic place, Freshour provided an even deeper satisfaction. It's such a powerful and harrowing book about the past: about the way our cultural past affects us collectively and the way we are each affected by our individual past. Tom Freshour, being half white, half Indian, is such a good character for this unfolding. And what a stunning indictment of white greed and American justice!