Silver Shield (Jimmy McSwain's Early Files, 1) by Adam Carpenter

[Ulysses]

Silver Shield (Jimmy McSwain’s Early Files 1)
By Adam Carpenter
Published by JMS Books, 2024
Five stars

I loved the Jimmy McSwain books, and thus was ready to embrace this novella, which is, essentially, his origin story. While we know what it was that sparked Jimmy’s career, and his obsession with his father’s murder, we had never learned just how he became a private investigator. This book does just that, and also opens up some personal insight into Jimmy’s status as a romantic loner.

All the people in Jimmy’s life are there, people who we see again and again in the course of the later series. The central emotional theme is still Jimmy himself, and how he decided the path he was going to follow. It’s short (just 88 pages) and sweet, and written in that distinctive way we’ve come to expect from Adam Carpenter.