Soldier's Gap is a non-traditional mystery with literary elements. The high school principal is brutally murdered, but Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins's search for meaning and love is a much more significant theme.
"Murder isn't usually this funny"
Amazon reviewer
High school principal, Jerry Egge, is bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat while on his morning run. When former Navy Seal Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins arrives on the scene, he accidentally touches the brim of Egge's University of Minnesota baseball cap and has a mystical experience to say the least. Egge's spirit seems to be trying to help Jenkins solve his own murder throughout the book, but Jenkins can't tell anyone, not even night deputy and Mescalero Apache, Mingo Jones, who believes in ghosts. Ironically he was an agnostic religiously until he minored in Native American religion when he went to school on a LaCrosse scholarship to study criminal justice at Johns Hopkins. Soldier is a small town in the Red River Valley where sugar beets drive the economy, and the characters in the novel are just as novel as the Red River which runs north. For instance, the smartest person in the book is Mo Pleasiac, Jenkins's genius of a neighbor who is still in high school, but seems to be a better detective than Jenkins
Excerpt
"The movie scrolled ahead to a schoolroom-an old fashioned one with the desks bolted to the floor in rows. A boy with a home-made haircut and a big head was slumped in the front row looking embarrassed. The teacher was yelling at the class to 'fess up and admit who took Kitty Hoefer's pencil case or she was going to keep them after school and they'd miss their buses. The little boy's face got really red. The teacher said, her finger in his face, "You took it, didn't you?" Then a little girl raised her hand. "Found if, Miss Dalrymple, it got tangled up in my extra underwear." The movie was gone. Dave stood, stumbled, nearly fell, then shook his head. He'd heard about this sort of thing before-a movie flashing through your mind as you're about to die. Thing is, it was supposed to be the dead guy reviewing his life just before he kicked off, not the first cop at the scene.
Professional Reviews Professional review
"With its complex interplay of bizarre yet believable characters, Soldier's Gap seems to fall somewhere between "Northern Exposure" and "Twin Peaks."
Dave King, Writers' Digest columnist
An Onion Worth Peeling
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.
Amazon Reviewer, "Active Verb"
Reality and Mysticism Uniquely Blended
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.
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