Review: The Buried Book by D.M. Pulley + Giveaway

Review: The Buried Book by D.M. Pulley + GiveawayThe Buried Book by D.M. Pulley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 399
Published by Lake Union Publishing on August 23rd 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & Noble
Goodreads

When Althea Leary abandons her nine-year-old son, Jasper, he’s left on his uncle’s farm with nothing but a change of clothes and a Bible.
It’s 1952, and Jasper isn’t allowed to ask questions or make a fuss. He’s lucky to even have a home and must keep his mouth shut and his ears open to stay in his uncle’s good graces. No one knows where his mother went or whether she’s coming back. Desperate to see her again, he must take matters into his own hands. From the farm, he embarks on a treacherous search that will take him to the squalid hideaways of Detroit and back again, through tawdry taverns, peep shows, and gambling houses.
As he’s drawn deeper into an adult world of corruption, scandal, and murder, Jasper uncovers the shocking past still chasing his mother—and now it’s chasing him too.

My Review:

The Buried Book is a chilling story about the loss of innocence and the end of childhood, told by a narrator who is unreliable for all the right reasons, but who just keeps trying to understand.

Jasper Leary is 9 years old. He feels abandoned when his somewhat mercurial mother takes him to her brother’s farm in rural Michigan, and leaves him there for an indefinite future. It is 1952 and all Jasper can see is that his mother doesn’t want him and his father doesn’t care enough to know where he is.

And living on the farm isn’t half as much fun for real as it is for vacation.

Everyone is trying to protect poor little Jasper. This isn’t the first time his mother has run off, but this is the first time she’s left him so far from home. And Jasper’s picture is probably the one in the dictionary next to the saying about “little pitchers” and “big ears”. No one tells Jasper exactly what’s going on with his mother, but he hears plenty – and all of it bad.

When he finds his mother’s childhood diary hidden away in the burned wreck of her parents’ old house, Jasper finds himself seeing into the thoughts and feelings of his mother when she was a 15-year-old girl – and discovers that there was plenty of bad stuff swimming below the surface of this sleepy little farming community back then – and fears that some of it might still be chasing his mother all these years later.

We follow Jasper as he tries to piece together a picture of what happened to his mother, then and now. There is so much that he tries to understand about the world around him, and he so often fails.

Not because he’s not intelligent, but because he has so little to go on. Everyone is trying to protect him from what they perceive as the inevitable awful truth. As far as most people are concerned, his mother is just a bad seed who probably came to her rightfully bad end. And he is, after all, just 9 years old, and he doesn’t yet understand all the terrible ways that the world works.

But she is Jasper’s mother. And he can’t give up, no matter how much trouble he gets himself into. He keeps pursuing that elusive truth, no matter how much the adults, both good and bad, try to keep him from pursuing his missing mother.

Jasper takes a journey through dark places that he is too young to understand. But he keeps going anyway. And in the end, learns that there are some things he would be better off not knowing. But he’ll never be a child again.

Escape Rating A-: The Buried Book is a story that rewards the reader’s patience. The set up takes a long time, and Jasper’s necessarily limited understanding and rightfully childish point of view can make it difficult for adult readers to get inside his head. It’s not a comfortable fit.

But it is a rewarding one. At about halfway, the story suddenly takes off. Jasper has learned enough, or stumbled into enough, that whatever is chasing his mother is also chasing him. He’s afraid to trust any of the adults in his world. He has no way of knowing friend from foe, but he is rightfully certain that the adults mostly want to stop him. And even if it is supposedly for his own good, he can’t let go.

There’s a painful lesson in here about the darkness that lies beneath, and that people don’t want to see. The events of his mother’s adolescence are still with her in Jasper’s present. She wasn’t able to trust any of the adults in her life, either. But the way that they failed her, and continue to do so, is a big part of what destroyed her life, and may also consume Jasper’s.

The end of this story is utterly heartbreaking. Jasper learns a terrible lesson. It’s the one about being careful what you wish for, because you might get it. When the story ends, Jasper is 12, and his childhood is over.

~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

I am giving away a copy of The Buried Book by D.M. Pulley to one lucky US or Canadian commenter:

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Review: The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley + Giveaway

Review: The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley + GiveawayThe Dead Key by D.M. Pulley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Pages: 470
Published by Thomas & Mercer on March 1st 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleBookshop.org
Goodreads


2014 Winner — Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award — Grand Prize and Mystery & Thriller Fiction Winner

It’s 1998, and for years the old First Bank of Cleveland has sat abandoned, perfectly preserved, its secrets only speculated on by the outside world.
Twenty years before, amid strange staff disappearances and allegations of fraud, panicked investors sold Cleveland’s largest bank in the middle of the night, locking out customers and employees, and thwarting a looming federal investigation. In the confusion that followed, the keys to the vault’s safe-deposit boxes were lost.
In the years since, Cleveland’s wealthy businessmen kept the truth buried in the abandoned high-rise. The ransacked offices and forgotten safe-deposit boxes remain locked in time, until young engineer Iris Latch stumbles upon them during a renovation survey. What begins as a welcome break from her cubicle becomes an obsession as Iris unravels the bank’s sordid past. With each haunting revelation, Iris follows the looming shadow of the past deeper into the vault—and soon realizes that the key to the mystery comes at an astonishing price.

My Review:

This is one wild story. It’s even wilder because the background is based on real events, specifically the events in 1977-1978 that resulted in the city of Cleveland defaulting on its debts in 1978, plunging the city into a downward spiral that took decades to recover from.

When I grew up in Cincinnati (the two cities are rivals), Cleveland was referred to as “the mistake on the Lake”, after the Cuyahoga River caught fire. During the default era, the joke was to ask the last person leaving Cleveland “to please turn out the lights”.

Cleveland defaulted because the Cleveland Trust Bank refused to extend its loans after the new Mayor refused to let some of their sweetheart deals go through. There was a LOT of corruption between the bank and City Hall.

In the book, Cleveland Trust becomes the First Bank of Cleveland. I suspect that the real skullduggery wasn’t quite as colorful as the fictional version. I’m also certain that the names of the players were changed to protect the guilty. Or at least the author. In real life, this situation was a big hot mess.

In fiction, the story is about a whole bunch of young women who were used and taken advantage of by a powerful man. And how they managed to get revenge on him and the other bankers who facilitated a whole bunch of fraud. Last but not least, one more young woman who they severely underestimated brings them all down. It only takes about 40 years to bring everyone left alive to the justice they so richly deserve.

This one is a mystery and a thriller all wrapped into one big package.

In the story, the bankers were defrauding their customers by stealing from safe deposit boxes. People put a lot of interesting things into the boxes, because they are supposed to be, well, safe. As long as you make your payments, that is.

So the bankers were going through the deposit records and looking for dead boxes, ones where the payments had stopped. Instead of turning the contents over to the State of Ohio, they were robbing the boxes, at least the ones containing valuables, and moving the contents into boxes under the names of people who had no idea this was happening. Usually the names of female employees that one of the bank directors was screwing. And also screwing over, since owning the boxes containing the loot would have made the women look like the perpetrators – no one would ever believe that the bank officers, all members of prominent and wealthy families, could possible have anything to do with theft.

One young woman kept her own records of what happened. Twenty years later, she planted her niece in the bank as an employee, so that the investigation could continue. Unfortunately for both of them, this was in December 1978 just as the bank was about to close, not that they knew that.

Poor Beatrice Baker found herself in the middle of a very amateur investigation, trying to figure out what was going on. Not that she started the investigation, but that her best friend Maxie started poking her nose where the bankers didn’t think it belonged.

In 1998, Iris Larch is working as a structural engineer, drawing plans of the old Cleveland Trust Building. The building has been locked up since 1978, and feels like a time capsule. Unlike most of the empty buildings in downtown Cleveland, someone is paying for around-the-clock security and the building is completely intact.

Possibly too intact. The desks still contain the employees’ stuff, and all the paper files are still intact. The longer she works in the creepy, empty building, the more weirded out Iris gets. Especially after she finds records of Beatrice and Maxie’s 20-year-old investigation. And Beatrice’s suitcase.

Iris seems to be disturbing old ghosts that wanted to remain hidden. Nothing that is happening is anything like it appears to be. Except the dead body in the blocked up bathroom. When Iris finds that, she discovers that none of the dead of the old bank are resting in peace. Except for the body she finds, they aren’t even dead.

But they want her to be.

Escape Rating B: This is a big book, and it’s a long story. While it felt a bit saggy in the middle, the final third is an absolute race to the finish. Once Iris finds the body, the book goes at a breakneck, edge of your seat pace until the wild finish.

If money is the root of all evil, then all the bankers at this place had their roots sunk in some very nasty places.

The story is told from two perspectives. We see Beatrice in 1978, trying to uncover what is going on. She is not an investigator, she is a very young woman who sees and hears too much. She finds out a lot, bit by excruciating bit, not just about what’s going on at the bank, but also about her own identity. Her world is much more dangerous than she imagined, and it was no bed of roses to begin with.

So we see Beatrice get herself in deeper and deeper hot water, but we don’t know for certain if she ever got out.

In 1998, we follow Iris as she creates the structural diagrams of the building. Along the way, Iris can’t resist poking into all those files and desk drawers, and discovers much too much about the events of 1978, and especially about Beatrice and her investigation. Her world gets creepier and creepier the more she discovers – especially when she starts asking questions of her own.

The difficulty that I had with the story is that Iris is not a sympathetic character. She gets in way over her head, and she’s being used, and she’s in terrible danger, but I just didn’t like her. I was fascinated by what she discovered, but I didn’t enjoy seeing the world through her eyes. It’s not that she is young and stupid about her future, because we were all there once. It’s her self-destructive attitude. She’s not merely a bored slacker, but she also seems to be a functioning alcoholic without being aware of it. All she does before she discovers Beatrice’s stuff, is to drink every night and go to work late every morning with a hangover and a blackout. And she always thinks she was entitled to get drunk for whatever reason.

She’s being set up to be fired, but doesn’t ever realize that she’s let herself fall into a trap that makes it a reasonable idea. Your mileage may vary, of course. I sympathized way more with Beatrice.

The mystery that surrounds the bank and its ending is teased out in way that keeps the reader on tenterhooks through the entire book. As Iris and Beatrice get deeper into the mystery, it becomes impossible to let go of their story.

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~~~~~~GIVEAWAY~~~~~~

D.M. Pulley is giving away a copy of The Dead Key to one lucky U.S. or Canadian winner.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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