The Boy In The Box

by George W. Parker

Six murders, child porn, horse racing, drug smuggling, beautiful women, crooked police, even more crooked lawyers it's all in a days work for Mavin Davis.

When a young boy is gruesomely murder in an apparent gang killing Marvin Davis is hired by the boy's family to clear his name. That is the starting point for Marv's march into the world of porn, horse race fixing, police corruption and murder, all to the tune of his own drummer.

247 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 5, 2013

About the author

George W. Parker has published an intertextual cycle of American genre novels: Death; Juxtaposed, The Letters, The Krew, Conversations at Night, and Vanishing Trick. Additionally, he has authored The Boy in the Box and The Law, the second and third novels in the Marvin Davis PI series along with Twin Killing, a serial killer novel, Choice Cut and Chop Shop zombie/noir novels. and the Dystopian YA novels, The Tunnel, The City, and The Prairie, as Wendy Alane Macfarland. He lives in Austin and is currently working on The Grove, an expansion on the zombie/noir world.

Paperback/ebooks available at Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/George-W-Parke...

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story was excellent, full of twists & turns in a great noir style. The hero is more of an 'everyman'. He's not brilliant nor do we get to see how tough he is in a fight, but he's honest & dogged. There were some excellent characters, although not all were fleshed out quite enough. That made some a bit more intriguing, but left me hanging on others. Hmmm... that pretty much sums up the novel. It's well on its way to being a 4 star book, but it wasn't quite consistent enough.

It didn't start out well. The first chapter was one of the weakest, but I kept reading & I'm glad I did. The story got stronger all the way and the end was quite an anticlimax in many ways, but extremely realistic, depressingly so. I'm not sure if that's good or not, but I'm still thinking about it. Any book of this sort that leaves me pondering has a lot going for it.

Editors are expensive, but necessary. There were quite a few words that even a decent ARC reader would have picked up - 'to' instead of 'too' & such. The whole story felt as if it could have used a bit of evening out. Still, I enjoyed it & this is an author to watch. He has an excellent imagination.