Boom Town

Tony Caruso Mystery #1

by Trevor Scott

Private Investigator Tony Caruso lives out of his rolling office, an old Ford pickup truck, with his German-trained bomb-sniffing dog, Panzer, a Giant Schnauzer. Tony retired after twenty years in the Navy as an aviation ordnanceman, but this training might not be enough when he is hired by an old friend to look into a murder suicide in Bend, Oregon, a resort Boom Town in the high desert east of the Cascades. Was it a murder suicide as the local sheriff thinks? Or has this idyllic community been ripped apart by not only murder but scandalous sexual deviance, lust, jealousy and the quest for the almighty dollar? Follow Tony as he wades through a cast of characters as diverse as the Oregon landscape to solve this mystery.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

217 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2006

About the author

Trevor Scott is the best selling author of more than 70 mystery/thriller novels in the Jake Adams International Espionage Thriller Series, the Karl Adams Series, and the Max Kane Series. He has sold more than 1.3 million copies of his books in a number of languages. He earned a master's in creative writing from Northern Michigan University, and a bachelor's in writing from the University of Minnesota-Duluth. He served in the U.S. Navy as an ordnanceman on the flight deck of aircraft carriers, and as an officer in the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War and the first Gulf War, where he retired as a captain. He previously worked as a writer and editor at a daily newspaper, and in the PR department at a small private college. He has traveled to more than 100 countries, all seven continents, and he currently resides in Nevada. He grew up in a small town near Duluth. He's a dual citizen of the U.S. and Italy.

Reviews

[Carole Mckee · Rating 5 out of 5]

So Very Good!

This one is a page turner. Once I started reading It I couldn't put it down. Tony Caruso is a cool Private Investigator, but also a talented photographer. At least with that talent he can't get hurt. While trying to unravel the truth behind what police were calling a murder-suicide, he gets shot, shot at, and beaten. That should be enough to prove that it was not a murder-suicide. But there is so much more to learn. Excellent story. I was intrigued all the way through it.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite a few formatting errors, I really enjoyed this book. Great character development, a simple mystery, some action, and even a budding romance. Having spent several years in the Bend area, I found a lot of the story regarding the setting to be relatable.

[Kay Haraguchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and edited, with only a few typos. Good story. A little too much sex for my taste and I appreciate his restraint with the violence.Good wins,, and I like that. Kind of sad to me that so much of rural Oregon is being GenX'd.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

New author for me, will read others in the series

[Nelson Reynolds · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book...

It had some nice potential with various arcs building. However, that basically fell apart in the last third of the book. The dialogs got... well, basically strange and stilted. And the arcs got rather jumbled. There were also quite a number of formatting errors in the book that made it difficult to read at times. Had it been a better story I would have submitted them for correction.

[Walt Mccluskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boom town

More than a little unbelievable in the relationship between the various characters Tony Caruso runs into even for a small town in the Pacific northwest. Panzer was the best friend he had and the most believable, but even he was too good to be true.

[Wayne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok for a $1 read.