Here in British Columbia, a small publisher called Touchwood Editions specializes in books for sale from revolving wire book racks at touristy locations: BC Ferries, in particular, but you can find them all over.
Some of their books are lovely (cookbooks, like Crip Up the Kitchen; most of their Brindle & Glass imprint, like Brian Thomas Isaac’s All the Quiet Places), and absolutely Touchwood is in its small way a cultural and an economic engine for this place. Every year, they publish books that wouldn’t ever find a home elsewhere, and they produce books genuinely from this place that would be diminished if they were to be edited into something more generic.
But wow, have I ever struggled with some volumes from the Touchwood Mystery imprint. I’ve enjoyed the Seaweed novels by Stanley Evans, which went over well with the Beer & Books club, and I’m tempted by Stephen Legault’s series featuring Cole Blackwater. Some others, though, wellllll…..
Certainly I’m the wrong person to comment on mystery novels, because they’ve never been something I’ve been able to get into, but what else am I going to do? Bruce Burrows’ The Fourth Betrayal is a mystery novel about pipeline construction, the routes assigned to oil tankers, an inside-baseball thread about investigative newspaper journalism, and the historic salmon fishery around northern Vancouver Island, with cameo visits to Sointula, Port McNeill, and who knows how many other places I’ve known. I’ve never met author Bruce Burrows, but he’s hit so many hot-button topics for me that there’s no way I’m not reading The Fourth Betrayal.
But argh.
I hoped that my mystery-reading brother-in-law would disagree with me, and explain that there were clear reasons that my unease (dislike?) wouldn’t matter to a true mystery reader. Alas, he felt similarly.
Writers need to make money, and I’m glad Touchwood has found a way to get some money into the hands of writers like Bruce Burrows. For some readers, this book’s going to work just fine, so feel free to ignore me. The good people at Goodreads seemed to like it, and it was positively blurbed by an MLA, a commercial fisher, and a long-time eco activist, so who needs an English prof anyway?
Honestly, it’s just that I needed another hundred pages, several more characters (or at least a clear sense that the world is bigger than these few people), and space for the plot to unfold at pace rather than thumping shudderingly through a number of Big Moments. My sense is that Bruce Burrows, if given enough time, which really means enough money, could’ve written a much more complex book than The Fourth Betrayal, and I think I might’ve fallen hard for that one. I’ve been trying to imagine it, in amongst the pages actually in front of me, but that’s not what I found myself actually reading.
Wow, do I hate writing negative reviews. I’m glad some other readers liked it, because I’d like Burrows to keep writing stories that speak to those of us living on BC’s west coast.