Lion's Head Revisited (Dan Sharp 7) by Jeffrey Round

[Ulysses]

Lion’s Head Revisited (Dan Sharp 7)
By Jeffrey Round
Published by Dundurn Press, 2020
Five stars

This is the final, but not the last book in the Dan Sharp series. The last two books were written out of sequence, and I had to look back at them and realize where that left us with Dan Sharp and his private life. Technically, this precedes “The God Game,” although it was written later. I’ll explain in a moment.

I love this series, and grew to like it more and more as I got to know Dan, his family, his friends, and his peculiar, dented but not broken personality. The plot of this book is, if possible, more Byzantine than the others—a complicated mess of kidnapping and murder that is only unraveled at the very end. You meet quite a few not-very-nice people who Dan is hired to help; and there is quite a lot of travel to an isolated vacation spot in Georgian Bay, Ontario. This local, and specifically the mountain, or coastal promontory named Lion’s Head, plays a central role in the story, but also resonates with Dan’s own sad childhood.

Dan’s son Ked plays a critical, but surprisingly small, role in this book. His close friends Donny and Praban appear only once with any significance. Nonetheless, these are the folks who are anchors in Dan’s life, and their relationship with Nick Trposki, the police sergeant who has become important to Nick, is a looming issue. All I can say is this book (published last) is an important lead-up to “The God Game,” which was published earlier. Why? Because I was looking for a happy ending, and sometimes it’s hard to spot in this series. Dan Sharp’s love life is not the purpose of Jeffrey Round’s books, but it is the emotional continuo that ties all of the stories together.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.