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False Negative (2012)

by Joseph Koenig(Favorite Author)

3.25 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0857685805 (ISBN13: 9780857685803)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Hard Case Crime

series

Hard Case Crime

review 1: Adam Jordan is a type-A newspaper reporter working for an Atlantic City daily in the spring of 1953. When he gets called out by his newspaper for badly botching a story, he is fired, only to have an unlikely angel tome to his rescue. He is hired on to write for True Detective magazine, a pulp publication that takes lurid murder stories turns them into magazine copy. Adam has some pretty good stories building - beauty contestants are dying on the Jersey Shore at an alarming rate, and Jordan is making some pretty powerful enemies as he tries to follow the cases. This story had a lot going for it, including local color, some solid characters and decent noir atmosphere, but it started to run off the rails as the author started to introduce characters that were stereotypical an... mored wooden and killed off a character that was interesting and integral to moving the story along. As much as I really wanted this story to work, it has to be seen as something of a disappointment, there was a lot to go on early in the narrative (especially a great fictional conversation between Jordan and Louis Armstrong) but those moments became fewer and fewer as the book progressed.
review 2: False Negative is one of the best novels Hard Case Crime has published in recent years and much like his chief character Adam Jordan, author Joseph Koenig shows his talents as a literary stylist. Julie Elliott of Library Journal summed this book up very nicely when she commented: “The snappy, fast-paced story follows the traditional hard-boiled style one comes to expect from this publisher, and Koenig’s characters, sense of place, and turns of phrase make the novel stand out.” Koenig writes with panache, the characters are fully fleshed and fascinating, and the dialogue is first-rate. I hope that the next book Koenig writes he sends it straight to Charles Ardai without a second thought. Koenig is an exceptional writer and this is an exceptional book. less

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