Michael Stephen Daigle's Blog, page 32

A snippet: Frank Nagler healing

From “A Game Called Dead.” How Frank Nagler begins to heal:

 

“He put the phone away and smiled wearily.  He thought of the night that Martha and he had ridden in the ambulance to Ironton General, that last night. His mind was racing, searching for words he could not find, tears flowing, hands sweating, angered and ashamed he could not find the words of comfort that should have been so easy to recite, something beyond “I’m sorry,” something deeper than even “I love you.”

And he had heard her voice, “I know, Frank.  I know, sweet Frank.” She had touched his face, then smiled; drilled her love through him with a soft, insistent stare; said nothing and closed her eyes.

[image error] [image error]All that time, he suddenly laughed.  I thought I had been the strong one, caring for you, protecting you, and it was you protecting me.

Something in his heart loosened and he felt lighter. This is how we love.

That’s what Harriet had meant: Let it go, Forgive yourself. You couldn’t protect Martha from the cancer; you could only love her and that was shield enough.  It was the lesson she had learned, Nagler understood.  Give it up, let go the pain and disappointments.  She had realized, he knew, that she could never undo her rape, and in a way, learned she could not use it as a lesson.  It was a thing, a terrible, dark thing. But she didn’t need to carry it with her anymore. She had given up ownership of it and made it the world’s.

What was Dawson’s phrase as he watched the rally earlier?

“Broken people in a broken town,” he had written. “Broken people, broken town dancing, broken no longer.”

His phone buzzed with a message. Lauren: “Saving u a dance. Hurry.”

Before he started his solo walk, and after Dawson left, she had come back to the bench at Leonard’s. She touched his weary face.

“I’m going to go the party at the community center and dance with Del and his hunky crew of helpers. I’m gonna drink some beer and eat some barbeque and dance and sing and shed all this terror, swap out the bad for good.  And you are going to take one of your grumpy solo walks and with each step a piece of this will fall off and wash away. There’s nothing here to fix, Frank, no apologies to offer. There is just you and me. Just like there was you and Martha. She was your great love. I am your sweet girl. There is room for both of us.  You are my sweet man, Frank Nagler.” Then she kissed him.

At the community center, the wild sounds grew denser and louder. The air sizzled and the ground rolled with rhythm. The drummers played before a chorus of wordless joy; sound as revelation, as revolution; air concussive and cleansing. And in the center, Lauren Fox, head back, eyes wide and mouth open in a scream as Del twirled her off his hip, let her go and caught her hand just as she tipped down.

And for a moment Frank Nagler’s vision was filled with the sight of an old school building standing dark against the night sky except for tunnels of light pouring like silver from the windows. Light like no one had ever seen; pure, bright, as if streaming from a powerful cell buried beneath the earth, not diffused, but a solid beam, like love.  And around the old school a crowd of gaily dressed people swung from side to side and called out each other’s names or dipped their heads all in a beat that never matched but had the same source jazzing around as if from an altar; dancing as if nothing in the world mattered except that moment and that it would never end or change. And on the sidewalks couples swung in crazy high-handed dance, twirled around trees and jitterbugged on the hoods and seats of jalopies strung out along the street like chariots of the in-tune and with-it gathered for the last, best boogie.

And there we were, dear Martha, swept along with the wash of the world, so grand and large, we could not measure it; a place so immense dreams could not fill it. And yet we tried, stumbling, laughing, reaching, me, the clumsy kid, and you, the red-haired beauty.

Nagler felt the wetness soak his head and shirt and was glad for it. He was sweating like he recalled sweating that night in the gym. It was like being alive again.

Then for the first time in a long time, a time so long he had forgotten the last time; for the first time in a long time, Frank Nagler closed his eyes and peacefully smiled.

Rest, my sweet.”

The award-winning “A Game Called Dead” and the other Nagler Mysteries are available at Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com .

 

 

A snipit: Frank Nagler healing

From “A Game Called Dead.” How Frank Nagler begins to heal:

 

“He put the phone away and smiled wearily.  He thought of the night that Martha and he had ridden in the ambulance to Ironton General, that last night. His mind was racing, searching for words he could not find, tears flowing, hands sweating, angered and ashamed he could not find the words of comfort that should have been so easy to recite, something beyond “I’m sorry,” something deeper than even “I love you.”

And he had heard her voice, “I know, Frank.  I know, sweet Frank.” She had touched his face, then smiled; drilled her love through him with a soft, insistent stare; said nothing and closed her eyes.

[image error] [image error]All that time, he suddenly laughed.  I thought I had been the strong one, caring for you, protecting you, and it was you protecting me.

Something in his heart loosened and he felt lighter. This is how we love.

That’s what Harriet had meant: Let it go, Forgive yourself. You couldn’t protect Martha from the cancer; you could only love her and that was shield enough.  It was the lesson she had learned, Nagler understood.  Give it up, let go the pain and disappointments.  She had realized, he knew, that she could never undo her rape, and in a way, learned she could not use it as a lesson.  It was a thing, a terrible, dark thing. But she didn’t need to carry it with her anymore. She had given up ownership of it and made it the world’s.

What was Dawson’s phrase as he watched the rally earlier?

“Broken people in a broken town,” he had written. “Broken people, broken town dancing, broken no longer.”

His phone buzzed with a message. Lauren: “Saving u a dance. Hurry.”

Before he started his solo walk, and after Dawson left, she had come back to the bench at Leonard’s. She touched his weary face.

“I’m going to go the party at the community center and dance with Del and his hunky crew of helpers. I’m gonna drink some beer and eat some barbeque and dance and sing and shed all this terror, swap out the bad for good.  And you are going to take one of your grumpy solo walks and with each step a piece of this will fall off and wash away. There’s nothing here to fix, Frank, no apologies to offer. There is just you and me. Just like there was you and Martha. She was your great love. I am your sweet girl. There is room for both of us.  You are my sweet man, Frank Nagler.” Then she kissed him.

At the community center, the wild sounds grew denser and louder. The air sizzled and the ground rolled with rhythm. The drummers played before a chorus of wordless joy; sound as revelation, as revolution; air concussive and cleansing. And in the center, Lauren Fox, head back, eyes wide and mouth open in a scream as Del twirled her off his hip, let her go and caught her hand just as she tipped down.

And for a moment Frank Nagler’s vision was filled with the sight of an old school building standing dark against the night sky except for tunnels of light pouring like silver from the windows. Light like no one had ever seen; pure, bright, as if streaming from a powerful cell buried beneath the earth, not diffused, but a solid beam, like love.  And around the old school a crowd of gaily dressed people swung from side to side and called out each other’s names or dipped their heads all in a beat that never matched but had the same source jazzing around as if from an altar; dancing as if nothing in the world mattered except that moment and that it would never end or change. And on the sidewalks couples swung in crazy high-handed dance, twirled around trees and jitterbugged on the hoods and seats of jalopies strung out along the street like chariots of the in-tune and with-it gathered for the last, best boogie.

And there we were, dear Martha, swept along with the wash of the world, so grand and large, we could not measure it; a place so immense dreams could not fill it. And yet we tried, stumbling, laughing, reaching, me, the clumsy kid, and you, the red-haired beauty.

Nagler felt the wetness soak his head and shirt and was glad for it. He was sweating like he recalled sweating that night in the gym. It was like being alive again.

Then for the first time in a long time, a time so long he had forgotten the last time; for the first time in a long time, Frank Nagler closed his eyes and peacefully smiled.

Rest, my sweet.”

The award-winning “A Game Called Dead” and the other Nagler Mysteries are available at Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com .

 

 

Hackettstown Library reading, March 14

I’ll be reading from and discussing the Frank Nagler Mysteries at the Hackettstown Public Library from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 14.

[image error]The library is located at 110 Church Street. This will be the second time I have been welcomed by Hackettstown Library.

Among  the topics will be a discussion of using local history as a backdrop for the mystery series, and how local places can be reimagined for use in fiction.

I will also discuss the new Nagler book “The Red Hand,” due this year.

Thank you to Library Director Rachel Burt for this opportunity.

For long range planning purposes, I will also be at the Independence Branch of the Warren County Library at 1 p.m., Saturday, May 11. Thanks to Lorraine Bloom for the offer.

This is a link to visit to the Mountainside Public Library that happened  a couple of years ago. Sometimes the evets have surprising results. https://wp.me/p1mc2c-uG

 

Maybe I’ll go bald

I think I’ll go bald.

Seems all the rage.

Actors who were popular when they had hair are now bald, and still seem popular.

That would mean that I would have to shave my head.

But I grew a beard because I didn’t like shaving in the first place.

[image error] Image by Ben_Kerckx on Pixabay

Besides, it drove some bosses crazy while they tried to determine if I had broken some company rule.

Or I could develop male pattern baldness, which I think should have showed up by now, so that’s out.

So, I guess I’ll never have the chance to play one of those FBI types who shows up in a TV show after a shooting and whispers into their fist about a subject on the loose, or a Russian spy or a genie.

Maybe I can start a cooking show on TV and lecture the audience on how to boil water and become orgasmic when the water shifts from a gentle simmer to a rolling boil.

And tell them sternly to save a cup of the pasta cooking water.

Naa. To do that I’d have to buy a few thousand dollars of equipment, find a fishmonger, and develop a taste for wine.

The reason I’m thinking about this is that I’m writing a story called “The year the world came to Mount Jensen, Maine.”

It’s about a town that is facing significant changes, both personally and historically.

One of the characters who will confront perhaps the most severe changes is Henderson, the local diner owner. His full name is Bill Henderson, but no one calls him Bill, just Henderson.

That becomes an issue when one of  the new residents in town informs Henderson that he is a culinary dinosaur, and under her tutelage, he can become Chef Henderson. All he needs to do at the start is replace the iceberg lettuce in his salads and sandwiches with arugula or kale, use more lemon juice and olive oil emulsions, stop selling his breakfast special and offer fresh vegetable omelets and fruit pate instead.

There is some resistance. I want to frame this resistance with humor, which will be a challenge.

But this a story about resisting or confronting change.

The notion comes to a head when Henderson again connects with  Nola Jensen, the femme fatale and Helen of Troy of the story, who returns after decades of absence and seems to want to start where she left off.  I’ll leave it at seems.

Their discussion changes the story and kicks events toward completion.

What does Henderson want to tell Nola, after all this time?

I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry I hurt you. You were a handful, a fun one at times, others not so much, leading us in a direction I was too dumb to  see or neither of us was ready to follow.

He also wants to tell her to get over herself, that everyone at times has a hard time, but hers, with her family connections and relative wealth, might have been self-inflicted. He wants to tell her that she is a pain in the ass.

But he doesn’t.

What he tells her is something like this: We all change over time, grow, learn. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes a lot.

He tells her this while they are on a raft on the lake in the middle of the night. It is a scene that is a repeat of their youth. He tells her that yes, they are on the same lake on the same raft, underneath the stars, but that those are not the same stars, it is not the same lake and they are not the same people.

Everyone in the town has had hard times, he tells her, but it comes a time to move on from the pain – and I’m stealing this phrase from a friend – to move from recovery to discovery.

I don’t yet know how either character will react to that thought, whether they show any sense of lights going on.

But it will be fun to find out.

Changing genres: Experimentation in writing

“A chef pulls at the edges of their menus to see what new tastes can be created, a photographer tries new mediums, combining old and new, an engineer, a teacher, a social worker, turn their efforts sideways to gain new perspectives and possibly see new solutions to existing problems.“

 

When I wrote the last word of the fourth Frank Nagler mystery, “The Red Hand,” I leaned back in my chair exhausted. It had taken eighteen months to complete the work, half again as long as the other three.

I needed a break.

[image error]All writers reach that point. It can be a combination of writing-centric concerns – a certain what-do-I-do-now-panic, too many ideas, no place to put them, or  something  outside of writing, something real-world, because writers do have real lives.

For me it was a combination. I had had shoulder surgery to correct painful tears and bone spurs which made even typing painful, but it was more… writing “The Red Hand” was harder than I anticipated.

I had written three Frank Nagler books over four years. The third one, “The Weight of Living” is an ever-changing story with many plot twists, and deep character emotions. The protagonist, Ironton, N.J. detective Frank Nagler is put through an emotional wringer and I leave him hanging off a cliff, so to speak.

For readers of the series, I knew I had to provide Frank a way off that cliff, and for me as the writer, I had to ask questions about how I would continue to tell Frank’s story.

So I started Book Five, the continuation of the series, and Book Four, the prequel to the whole thing. I finished Book Four, and have Book Five in various stages of construction.

But I was in a rut.

“The Red Hand” is good. It provides many answers to questions that I and readers had about Frank, his wife, Martha, his hometown, Ironton, N.J., and is a spooky thriller at the same time.

The writing problem was that I knew the story too well. I needed to know less about it, not more. That process of unlearning was time-consuming and exhausting.

So I sort of stopped writing.

I wrote a few things — it was not writer’s block, something I parodied in a piece called “Why writing a first draft is like performing stand-up with hecklers” – it can be found here: https://wp.me/p1mc2c-BM — but was an examination  of what I wrote and how I wrote it.

Like most writers I have files with ideas and incomplete stories, and since I began writing when we all used typewriters I have a large plastic tub with manila folders and boxes of typewritten manuscripts. You never throw out an idea; everything can be a work in progress.

That does not mean that you pull out the manuscript and begin the story where you left off.  You’re a different person, a different writer than you were when you began that work. You’ve aged, maybe had some success, moved, met new people, read more books, found friends, lost friends, wondered about the difference, gazed at different stars.

A chef pulls at the edges of their menus to see what new tastes can be created, a photographer tries new mediums, combining old and new, an engineer, a teacher, a social worker, turn their efforts sideways to gain new perspectives and possibly see new solutions to existing problems.

The works I pulled out were a story that years ago I had called “Oswald’s War,” about conflicts in a small Maine town. I had written some character scenes, and made notes on others.

The other piece was something called “Another Day of Here.” And it began: “Harry Demain didn’t make it to work on Tuesday.

And that night, he didn’t make it home for dinner.

A day later, when he hadn’t appeared either at work or his home, his wife Louise, after she checked his desk calendar for a possible business trip she had forgotten, and by then sufficiently worried, called the police.”

That’s all I had written. What could I do with that?

Is it Harry’s story or Louise’s?

I’ve made more progress, if that is the word, with the other tale, now entitled, “The year the world came to Mount Jensen, Maine.”

These stories are narrative fiction, at least in theory.

I’m not abandoning mystery writing.

Indeed, while pondering all of these other questions, I found a framework to use for the fifth Frank Nagler book: A copy cat not of crime methods, but of Frank’s investigative methods turned to crime. For good measure, reporter Jimmy Dawson’s news website has been hacked, and Lauren Fox, Nagler’s companion, may be running for mayor. I also have to resolve Leonard’s condition and his relationship with Calista Knox. So, a lot of stuff. Might be called “The Rhythm Method,” because that is what Frank tried to find, a rhythm to the crimes.

Taking on the other genres is this: Mystery writing is a highly manipulative. The reader is at times being led to the solution, and at other times, away from it.

What these new stories are is a challenge: They will require a different approach to character, setting, plotting. They are also a learning experience: How to tell the stories of the several characters. How to mine the changes that have occurred to me, the author? What things do I know that are different? What can I learn that I then can apply to the Frank Nagler mysteries?

The first book I wrote when I was in my early twenties was “Welcome to Gokey Manor,” a coming-of-age saga. The second one I wrote was an early version of a Frank Nagler mystery.

So here I am today, performing the same juggling act.

Boot

If Achilles had a boot, the world would all be different.

What would have Homer written if the Greeks had not needed a reason to invade Troy and appease the gods?

[image error]How would great stories about star-crossed lovers ever emerge if Paris had shot his arrow and it bounced off the hard plastic form on Achilles’ ankle

rather than strike that one vulnerable spot?

Ah, the gods did not want perfection, they wanted one little place that could hobble their playthings, set us limping and stumbling in and out of love as a reminder that life is about wanting and forgiving at the same time.

What fun would it be if everything was one from column A, and one from column B?

They wanted us to open the Trojan horse and be surprised.

They wanted me to gaze into your eyes and ponder how their softness could be both the pleasure of discovery and the pain of uncertainty.

A taste of something new (and not a murder mystery)

This a  piece from a story called “The year the world came to Mount Jensen, Maine.”

[image error]It’s the tale of a small Maine town that is going through changes and features such characters as Max Danton, a teen-ager blogger, Henderson, the diner owner — because I can’t have a  story without a diner — a few locals, and Nola and Emma Jensen, mother and daughter whose arrival in Mount Jensen  sets the story in motion, consequences be damned.

The story is generational, about rebellion, examining old relationships and postures, and standing up for oneself in the face of overwhelming odds.

After writing (and still writing) the Frank Nagler Mysteries I want to try a larger story, stretch out a bit and apply what I learn in that process to Frank Nagler and Ironton.

This is from Max’s blog:

 

You have to understand about this place, Mount Jensen, Maine.

People came here a long time ago. It was in the middle of nowhere then and it’s still in the middle of nowhere. It’s like, if you go to the end of the road, you have to go even further to find Mount Jensen. That how middle of nowhere it is.

But somehow that changed when Emma Jensen arrived.

She was thirteen.

Her mother was Nola Jensen, who I found out later might have been the most notorious person this little settlement had ever produced.

I mean, they were THE Jensens, from the family that named this place.

When you’re a kid, you don’t really think about the name of the place you live. Everyplace had a name. It could be named after a physical feature like Bear Mountain, or a lake, like Belgrade Lake, or maybe an Indian name that was mangled into English, like Skowhegan

But this place is Mount Jensen, Maine, and Emma’s family named it.

That was pretty cool, knowing that.

Then it got complicated. I think that was because Emma had been out there and then came here. Out there, that place none of us knew except over the Internet, the imagined world of loud big cities, murders and crime and armed men and women, protestors with signs and politicians promising everything, and more music and stories and art than any one person could ever absorb, a place so big it overwhelmed the  imagination of a little Maine kid like me. It made you want to go out there, but also made you afraid to do it, like you’d be devoured.

That’s what Emma brought to Mount Jensen, and the place was never the same.

I’m Max Danton. I’m fifteen, and this is my blog.

My Dad runs the general store. It’s a three-story square brick building that sits in the middle of the town at the crossroads and from the historical notice that hangs above the cash register, the store has been here since 1846. That’s the date carved into a hunk of granite that rests above the main entrance. We haven’t always run the general store. But you probably guessed that. My Dad bought it I guess twenty-five years ago. He was a manager for an insurance company in New York and got tired of it, came here on vacation one day and never left because he bought the store. That was a surprise to my mother, which might have been the reason she left after I was born. He just announced it one day, I’ve been told, rented a cabin on the backside of the lake for two months, went back to New York, quit his job, sold the house and then showed up one day in Mount Jensen with his family and a trailer of our furniture.

We — me, my older sister Sarah, and my Dad, Roger Danton — live in the top two floors of the grocery building. I was told that my mother left after ten years of that because she missed the big city. She’s never been back.

When I got old enough to understand it, I found out the real reason my mom left was that old Roger was screwing the postmaster, Evelyn Jones. She was after Mary Carson, a shop owner, and before Nancy Harrington, a teacher.

My father was the reason I didn’t hang out with other kids in town. I got tired of being asked “who’s next,” or does he keep a score card, and even if my mother was one of those other women in Mount Jensen.

When I was smaller, I’d hike out the Halfway Rock alone, you know, just to get away. Sometimes I’d fish, or read. But mostly I’d lay on rocks and plan battles in  my head. I had read some of the histories, about how the settlers of the village hunted and farmed, built their homes, and sometimes made peace with the natives, and other times fought them.

When Emma arrived, she joined me in the woods, we outsiders. She taught me paintball, and that was when the battles became real.

We ended up in the woods because before that we had battles that had us running all over this old dusty place, along the lake front, under the floor of the gristmill  that was held up by a couple of rotted old posts, or through the annex of the burned out Inn, through the weeds behind the Congregational church and up and down the hills, behind cars and trucks out to Bachelor’s store, a half-mile from the center of town, then back through the scrub along the road. We left paintball splatters on walls of empty buildings, on the tarred road and on the Stop sign at the main intersection. We had to head to the woods because Mrs. Wilson’s car got blasted accidently when Emma  ducked behind it and I was a little slow on the draw. I cleaned it off, but Mrs. Wilson was a mean old cuss who chased general store customers away from parking in front of her house. Not like this place had any parking lots or even parking rules. Just don’t block the road or a log truck would take out your fender. Not like we were stealing stuff. We were just a couple masked teen-agers armed with paintball markers that looked like machine guns and occasionally we’d pop out of nowhere and blast away.

Little did we know at the time but those paintball games were the start of the rebellion. And little did Emma know – or maybe she did because she’d wink and wiggle her freckled nose at me – but she set me free.

Selfie

[image error]Time is balance and dreams we try to remember.

A warm yes and a cold no, the uncertain in between: Somehow all the same.

Pulling nails alone will not reveal truth.

The plaster must be smashed.

The veneer broken and crumbled to the ground.

The wall must be demolished, its false shield violated,

layers of time like coats of paint scraped away.

Strip away the coverings: This is what you’ll find of me.

Dress the bones how you see fit.

Another 5-Star review for ‘The Weight of Living.’ Thanks from a grateful author

HOT NEW REVIEW: ★★★★★ The Weight of Living “Intrigue at its finest!”

February 12, 2019

I picked this book to read from a recommendation of a friend. By accident, I started with book 3 of the Frank Nagler Mystery series. I was not disappointed as the book was a fantastic stand-alone for a series and I immediately read the first two, after. This story was set in a typical American small city/town. The scenes were set and believable to the point I thought I was working with the protagonist as I continued reading to try and solve the twisting story. Corruption exploited the scores of many locations and scenarios. The girl was a great addition to the story and made me want to find out more. I highly recommend this read and the full series. Kudos to the author.

 

My great thanks to the reviewer of this stunning review of “The Weight of Living.”

Who is “The girl?”

She opens the book:

[image error]“She seemed hollow, the girl did. Breathing, hearing, touching, but absent. Small, dark dots sunk into an ashen blank face, eyes impossibly dull for someone so young, eyes that stared straight ahead at the faded green wall; hard, eyes so hard that did not seem to register the color of the wall, the brown of the tabletop, the light bulb above her head or the presence of anyone else. Robotic. From the police car to the police station and into the back office she walked with slow, short steps, and once in the room without being told, she slipped sideways into the green vinyl chair with the tear in the seat that exposed the white cotton batting inside; the chair that engulfed her, hips too small to fill the worn indentation in the center of the seat as she faced the wall, folded her hands on the table and sat upright.

Her eyes held no light; expressionless, passages not to a dark soul, but to one seemingly hidden or removed; spaces missing life. Eyes not filled with pain, but absence.

Her hair was raggedly cut and filthy, as was her thin, damaged body. Grime lived in her skin folds, under her fingernails, on and in her skin so deeply its color changed from white to brown-gray; dirt so thick her skin shed water like plastic.

 

Later, Leonard, Detective Frank Nagler’s blind bookstore owning friend says this:

 

“I was thinking about the little girl, what she must be going through. I tried to speak to her when we were kidnapped” — he laughed — “trying to reassure her. She was so withdrawn; I could feel it in her hands when we talked. I told her I was blind, and the only way I would know she was still there was if I held her hand. Sometimes the pressure was tight, hard, like she was holding onto this world, and other times light and playful. When she held my hands tightly, I think she was fighting against her protective instinct to slide deep within herself.” He leaned forward and rested his cheeks on his balled fists. “I wanted at times to figuratively reach inside her soul, to free it, but I could not. Someone must, Frank, or she will be lost. We are so much alike, she and I, so apart from this world.” He wiped his eyes, now tearing. “I didn’t even have a name I could call her. Who has no name, Frank?”

 

“The Weight of Living” (2017) was awarded FIRST PLACE for Mysteries in the 2017 Royal Dragonfly Book Contest;

Named a NOTABLE 100 Book in the 2018 Shelf Unbound Indie Book Contest;

Named a DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE in the 2018 Independent Press Awards,

Named a DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE in the 2018 Big NYC Book Contest.

 

The Nagler books are available in ebook and paperback at:

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Stephen-Daigle/e/B00P5WBOQC/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1548863995&sr=1-1

 

An anthology edition, containing  all three Nagler books and a bonus short story, “Who Shot the Smart Guy  at the Blackboard?”  is available in ebook, paperback and hardcover at:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Frank+Nagler+Mysteries%3A+An+Anthology

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-nagler-mysteries-michael-stephen-daigle/1129938809?ean=9781944653125

An audio version of “The Swamps of Jersey” is available at: https://www.amazon.com/The-Swamps-of-Jersey/dp/B07BT8WHM3/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 

5-Star review of ‘The Weight of Living’ : ‘A stunning and engrossing meditation on grief and survival’ (Thank you!)

Thanks to this reviewer for their reading of “The Weight of Living.”

Coming soon, “The Red Hand,” the prequel that tells you all you wanted to know about Frank Nagler and Ironton, N.J.

The review:

5 STARS. HOW DEEP DOES THE POISON GO?

January 26, 2019

“THE WEIGHT OF LIVING by Michael Stephen Daigle balances its thriller tenets with solid characters, razor-sharp dialogue, and a breathless plot that careens from one realistic scenario to another. The narrative is a stunning and engrossing meditation on grief and survival that examines the insular world of Ironton, New Jersey whose past is clouded by everything from a devastating flood, to the near extinction of viable business opportunities to slimy politicians.

Frank Nagler, an investigator with the local police department has seen it all. His latest foray to the dark underbelly of Ironton involves a young girl discovered standing shoeless in a dumpster clad only in a tank top and shorts. The weather is freezing and the girl isn’t talking, either because she is unable to or chooses not to.

The tale unfolds as several characters ranging from our stalwart protagonist to an array of complex characters who each adds insight and ultimate resolution into the intricate and deeply troubling mystery.

Daigle has provided an engrossing portrait of a town and its residents that examines the pain inflicted by long buried secrets as he couples these with tension and a pensive sadness that hooks the reader and never lets up.”

[image error]“The Weight of Living” (2017) was awarded FIRST PLACE for Mysteries in the 2017 Royal Dragonfly Book Contest;

Named a NOTABLE 100 Book in the 2018 Shelf Unbound Indie Book Contest;

Named a DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE in the 2018 Independent Press Awards,

Named a DISTINGUISHED FAVORITE in the 2018 Big NYC Book Contest.

 

The Nagler books are available in ebook and paperback at:

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Stephen-Daigle/e/B00P5WBOQC/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1548863995&sr=1-1

 

An anthology edition, containing  all three Nagler books and a bonus short story, “Who Shot the Smart Guy  at the Blackboard?”  is available in ebook, paperback and hardcover at:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Frank+Nagler+Mysteries%3A+An+Anthology

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-nagler-mysteries-michael-stephen-daigle/1129938809?ean=9781944653125

An audio version of “The Swamps of Jersey” is available at: https://www.amazon.com/The-Swamps-of-Jersey/dp/B07BT8WHM3/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=