Straw Man

by Gerry Boyle

Overview

Crime reporter Jack McMorrow is drawn into the darkest tangle of his career when a story about illegal gunrunning between Massachusetts and Maine overlaps with a puff piece about Mennonites. Cultures and tempers clash as Jack tries to keep one step ahead of a looming tide of violence that threatens to take him and his family down forever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939017932
Publisher:	Islandport Press
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Gerry Boyle began his writing career in newspapers, an industry he calls the “best training ground ever.” After graduating from Colby College, Gerry knocked around, working as a roofer, a postman, and then as a manuscript reader in New York. However, Boyle quickly realized he preferred his adopted northern state to the bustle of Manhattan. His first reporting job was in the paper mill town of Rumford, Maine, before he moved on to the (Waterville) Morning Sentinel, where editors learned quickly that he worked best when left to his own devices. And Boyle learned that the line between upstanding citizen and outlaw is a fine one, indeed. His experiences as a reporter inspired his first novel, Deadline in 1993. He continues to write gritty, authentic mysteries featuring his signature character, Jack McMorrow.

Editorial Reviews

03/07/2016
Boyle’s engrossing 11th Jack McMorrow Mystery (after 2015’s Once Burned) opens in the woods of Waldo County, Maine, with the freelance reporter and his friends, Clair and Louis, getting into a fight with men illegally harvesting lumber from an old woman’s land. The thieves lose the brawl, but they vow retribution and start stalking Jack’s family. Jack responds with force, escalating the feud and driving a wedge between him and his wife, Roxanne, a social worker who’s passionate about peaceful conflict resolution and fears that Jack is setting a poor example for their daughter, Sophie. Deftly drawn characters and a strong sense of place add texture and depth to this gritty tale of rural crime and vigilante justice. Jack and Roxanne’s marital strife imbues even otherwise mundane scenes with tension, and Jack’s journalistic research into Old Order Mennonites and private gun sales paves the way for thoughtful discussions regarding religion, faith, and the cycle of violence. Ample action drives the story toward a pat but otherwise gratifying conclusion. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Jack McMorrow gets into some vicious fights in Straw Man, Gerry Boyle’s new mystery in his rugged series set in the wilds of Maine. Take the bone-crunching brawl that Jack and his military-trained friends, Clair and Louis, get into when they run across four big guys with chain saws poaching hardwood trees on an old woman’s land. The repercussions of that little scuffle not only complicate the onetime newspaper reporter’s freelance assignment on private gun sales in Maine, but also endanger his family. The most hurtful fights, though, are those clenched-teeth­exchanges with his wife, Roxanne, over an elementary-school project on pacifism that has her working closely with the soft-handed gentleman goat farmer who owns Heaven Sent Farm. (‘Must be cashmere goats,’ Jack notes.) The difficulties facing peaceful people who must live in a violent world are revisited when Jack tries to write a story on a community of Old Order Mennonites. But, as Clair says when he hands Jack a Glock with an extra clip and two boxes of ammo: ‘I’m all for pacifism. . . . But I’m not gonna die for it.’"

The New York Times Book Review