If this first mystery from fantasy author Rosenberg (Not Exactly the Three Musketeers) were a movie, it might be titled "The Boyz in the 'Hood Take a Day Trip to Lake Woebegone." Ernest "Sparky" Hemingway, a 50-ish copyeditor living in Hardwoods, N.Dak., gets a call from the teenage daughter of his Vietnam buddy George "Prez" Washington (an officer with a strange sense of humor put them both in the same tank crew, along with a guy called Doc Holliday). Seems that Prez, a Minneapolis pharmacist, has been killed by some of that city's burgeoning crew of gangbangers and left instructions that Hemingway and/or Holliday (now practicing medicine in Indianapolis) were to be called to look after daughter Tenisha in the event of his death. After both Sparky and Doc rush to Minneapolis and anger a large number of gangstas and local cops, Sparky takes the scared, shy, sullen Tenisha home to Hardwoods, where the locals are astonished to find an urban black teenager in their midst. An FBI agent with a Vietnamese face and a Norwegian last name shows up, making mysterious noises about Prez and his daughter; then four young black males are found dead in a car not far from Hardwoods. Rosenberg's plotting has some intriguing twists, and his portrait of Sparky as a man smarter and tougher than he looks is interesting, but the disparate elements never quite gel into an exciting or entertaining whole. (Mar. 12)
FYI:The author should not be confused with Joel C. Rosenberg, author of the bestselling thriller
The Last Jihad, also from Forge.
