Elder Carson works in Olinda, an ancient city on the northeastern coast of Brazil. It is lush green, full of old churches and white-sand beaches and drug traffickers protecting their turf.
One night, Carson is homesick and wide awake. The midnight hour is humid and hot. It is February, and carnaval is in full swing. Carson gets up. He goes out alone. He finds a phone and calls his girlfriend back in Utah.
Things happen that night—bad things—before Carson can make it back to his apartment. The next thing Carson knows, he’s a suspect in a murder investigation. And not only that—gangsters, extremely dangerous men, have taken a sudden interest in Elder Carson . . .
Title: Millstone City
Author: S.P. Bailey
Publisher: Zarahemla Books
Release Date: June 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0984360352
Size: 210 pages, 5.5 x 8.5, softcover
Genre: Suspense
This book has many problems.
For example, the first chapter starts in the first peson point-of-view, and then the second chapter shifts to an all knowing narrator, who can read into the minds of others. Of course, an author can shift a point-of-view, but usually this is done with multiple first person narrators, such as Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. Shifting from a first person, inside the head of one person, then going to a narrotor who can see inside the heads of all characters, could be handled by a skilled author, with great care, but Bailey is not that. All beginning writing manuals warn against this grave mistake, but Bailey missed those chapters, one can only presume.
Another example: the book is written in the present tense, which is meant to bring immediacy to the action, but unfortunately the author frequently uses the past tense, while we are still in the present. He most frequently does this while a character is thinking about the past, and the author then shitts to the present action, but forgets to change the tenses. It comes across as exceedingly sloopy.
I could mention the many grammatical problems, but that would make this message too long.
No matter what genre a book may fit into, it should be better written than this.