The Late Man

by James Preston Girard

In mid-eighteenth-century Connecticut, members of one courageous and determined family struggle to build new lives and create a homestead called Marshfield. Reprint.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime

Mass Market Paperback

First published October 10, 1993

About the author

James Preston Girard was born in Oregon in 1944 while his father was stationed at the U.S. naval base in Tillamook. When he was less than a year old, his father was killed, and his mother moved the family back to Kansas. Girard's family moved in with his grandparents in Longton, Kansas, where both his parents had grown up. His mother eventually found a job at Boeing in Wichita, Kansas, and moved the family there.

Girard lived in Wichita until graduating from East High in 1962, despite a brief period in Corpus Christi, Texas. He enrolled at Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas, where he planned to major in Linguistics.

Girard began writing seriously as an undergraduate at KU, first poetry and then fiction. His ability to write and the flattery from those around him, including his future wife, whom he met while at KU, led him to change his major to creative writing.

After graduating from KU, Girard was accepted to the John Hopkins graduate writing program. Their program consisted of writing for one year and then the awarding of an MA.

He has also written as Jeffrey Tharp.

Reviews

[Aldwin · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst novels I've read. Really. I admit I was enticed by the glowing reviews in the cover, one saying that this is probably "the mystery of the year". Perhaps, the real mystery here is, did they read the book from cover to cover before they made these reviews?

I was dismayed that I painstakingly trudged along to see what the ending was. Unfortunately, the mystery was left hanging and you never knew who the serial killer was. Or I may have missed something as I spent almost 3/4 of the time skipping over paragraphs which belabor meaningless thoughts from the main characters.

Actually, the search for the serial killer is not the main storyline here. But the thoughts of 3 main characters as their lives intertwined during their search for this killer. No thrills and twists here, no chases, no action, no suspense, nothing. Just mental babble from characters we don't really care about.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this decades ago but picked it up again as part of a reading challenge. I once worked with the author and could “hear” him telling this story of a police detective and two reporters trying to solve a brutal murder. It’s set in my city and includes tons of references to the city and the newspaper where we worked - all details that made reading it more enjoyable. And the plot is a good one - based loosely on a serial murderer here, a case that hadn’t been resolved when this was written in 1993. But 30 years later, I’m aware that the book needed a bit more editing than it got. Still, great reread.

[RetroHound · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read a book that takes place in Kansas. The first chapter was pretty good, the second was a new character going on for pages and pages about his late wife's infidelity, and the third almost went back to the murder, but it sidestepped into another character's emotions about his ex-wife for pages. Perhaps if you like literature you might like this, I like mystery and the main mystery seemed to be how these guys were going to deal with their emotions. I stopped partway into chapter 3, so keep that in mind when looking at my rating.

[Kathy Spann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A different kind of mystery to read. Three distinct characters muddle through life bumping into each other. It makes you question our responsibilities toward each other’s happiness.

[Dr. Phoenix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well it is really a mixed bag. The plot is stimulating and well developed. I read this story several years ago and came back to revisit it. I do not like to give standard "he did that," "she said that" type of reviews because it can spoilt it for those who have not read it before. Suffice it to say there are a lot of subtle twists and turns that keep the adventure going and the ending has a nice twist surprise.

TECHNICALLY:

Unfortunately I have no idea who does, or did the editing at Signet group but the text is littered with grammatical errors. pp 27,67,130,185,210,353 and maybe a few I overlooked.
The language is stilted but it works for reading. I found myself, on several occasions, repeating the character lines aloud and sure enough nobody speaks like this in reality, still as an artifice it does work. There is the use of some specialized acronyms GA?? VDTM? I mean come on you cannot possibly expect your reader to understand this and they need to be either clarified or spelled out in the text.


The characters smoking their heads off was a particular nuisance and bothered me but that is a personal quirk. n reflection I thought that perhaps the author used this vice as a way of indicating some weakness in the character of the individual being described.


There are some truly brilliant insights and some well founded observations about people, psychology and criminal justice.

Here are a few lines I found that really "spoke to me"

- "He recognized it as a rebirth of the old need that had made a reporter of him,the need to share and tell." Brilliant this is followed by some interesting and deep insights

- "What he saw was a man of craft without art, ambition without aspiration." - Again simply brilliant wording and metaphorical language.- "Love is easy, she thought, appalled by the discovery. You really have to know someone to be friends." Again profound insight into human nature.

Conclusion:

Loved the story and would have given it 5 stars but for the number of annoying technicalities. also the story does not really take of until around page 69 prior to that it is a drudge and the plot seems to conflict with the rest of the story. There is another point when he returns home whee the plot was again becomes laborious. But perhaps it is the authors technique for building the suspense and further establishing the characters background state.

Final Conclusion: An interesting and gripping tale worth reading.

[bette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Little different...had its good moments