Jack McMorrow books by Gerry Boyle The Mystery Book Club of the Manchester Public Library will have its regular meeting on Friday, January 29 when we will discuss a book by Gerry Boyle, Pretty Dead. Boyle will not be at that meeting but will be presenting at the library on the previous evening on Thursday January 28 at 6:30 pm and I strongly urge our members to attend and invite others. He will be making the 3 hour January weather trip to be with us that evening. Hopefully, we can make the 3 to 30 minute trip to join him! Gerry Boyle was born in 1956 in Chicago, grandson of Irish immigrants. His parents soon moved to Rhode Island, where he graduated from high school in Warwick. He graduated from Colby College in Maine, Class of 1978, majoring in literature, and began to write short stories and poetry. Boyle's first career was in journalism. He began as a reporter at the Rumford Falls Times, a weekly in Rumford, a Maine paper-mill town, then moved to the Morning Sentinel, a daily in Waterville, Maine, his old college town, going on to become a full-time columnist on the paper. As Boyle traveled around Maine looking for stories, he invented a freelance journalistdetective called Jack McMorrow. The first McMorrow mystery, Deadline, was published when he was 37. Two years later, it was followed by Bloodline, and there are now ten books in the series. He also has two books in another series that features a Portland, Maine police rookie, Brandon Blake. Boyle left the Morning Sentinel in 1999 but until 2001 continued to write a column for the paper from time to time. In 2000, he became editor of Colby Magazine. Boyle married Mary Victoria Foley, a schoolteacher. They have three children and live in China, Maine. [Above information from Wikipedia.] The Mystery Book Club selected Boyle as a New England writer for this year s series of mysteries, but it is not the first time. In August of 2007, our group read his 4 th book, Potshot. This year we are reading #7, Pretty Dead. As with other books this year, Pretty Dead was selected from among those on the McMorrow list mainly because it is the earliest book for which enough copies were available for our group through the Merrimac Valley Library Consortium (MVLC). Fortunately, you can read Pretty Dead (due January 29 for our Mystery Book Club meeting) without having read the previous 6 books and yet have no trouble following the storyline in Pretty Dead. Boyle is good at letting readers know the key ingredients of anything needed from earlier books (which is not much) to make sense of a current book. These are the ten books that feature Jack McMorrow, a journalist living in rural Maine: 1. Deadline (1993) 2. Bloodline (1995)
3. Lifeline (1996) 4. Potshot (1997) 5. Borderline (1998) 6. Cover Story (2000) 7. Pretty Dead (2003) 8. Home Body (2004) 9. Damaged Goods (2010) 10. Once Burned (2015) SETTING SUMMARY FOR THE FIRST 7 BOOKS: In the first book, Jack is living in Androscoggin County in a fictional town of the same name. In the following books, he is living in Waldo County, in the fictional town of Prosperity on what he calls the dump road. In books 2 and 3, the action is mainly in Waldo County. In books 4 and 5, Jack sleeps in Prosperity but travels to the NW Maine wilderness, towns along the Kennebec River, Lewiston, and even Lawrence MA (called Valley, MA). Book 6 takes place entirely in New York City. And Pretty Dead (book 7) takes place in large part in the fictional town of Blue Harbor, along a peninsula, accessible from Route 1, not far from Bucksport.
Want a Summary of the First Six Books in the Series? I have just read the 6 earlier books. Keep reading - if you want background on McMorrow s career from the earlier books. Spoiler Alert: The following may reveal more than you should know- but only if you plan to read the first book in the series. Otherwise it is background information with brief plot teasers. Jack McMorrow is a journalist by trade, not a private eye; yet he sounds like a PI because like so many PI novels, it is told through the first person. Add to that McMorrow s steady stream of cynical and self-deprecating wit as he describes what is happening along with his bull-headed personality (not always supported by a background in boxing and guns), and you have a tough (or unlucky) investigative reporter at work on the back roads of rural Maine. (1) DEADLINE: The first book introduces McMorrow as a guy who has recently moved from New York City to Androscoggin, Maine to work as editor on a small weekly newspaper. It was a big jump from his previous jobs at big city newspapers, culminating in a stint as reporter on the city desk at the New York Times. The book begins with the death of the Androscoggin s newsweekly s photographer, a quiet guy who led a rather reclusive and solitary life. The local police refuse to investigate the death despite McMorrow s belief that the evidence clearly points to murder. As McMorrow begins to ask questions, he meets resistance from the police, local business interests, and the paper s owner. Things escalate quickly when McMorrow is threatened and then abducted and beaten. In the climax to Deadline, McMorrow learns that some of the characters associated with his small-town paper have criminal backgrounds and/or serious psychological problems. McMorrow, disillusioned as a reporter at the New York Times before the series even begins, is now also disillusioned by events at the small town Maine weekly. And, while he solved the murder, it didn t earn him many friends in Androscoggin. So he leaves Androscoggin and moves north and eastward into the backwoods of Waldo County. He can t bring himself to get a job with any newspaper, so he tries to support himself with freelance writing. He sells a story to a Maine photo-magazine on irises (yes, flowers!). But in reality, he is living off the $9,308 remaining from his New York Times retirement pay-out. (2) BLOODLINE: Then McMorrow gets a call from a friend working for a New England magazine based in Massachusetts. They want a story on what it s like for high school girls having babies in rural-poverty-stricken Maine. He figures he can collect $3000 for a few days of research and writing, so he agrees. Within a day, he starts accumulating enemies both of high school age and then adults who see that he is interfering in their lives. How so? Apparently, some of the teenage
mothers are giving their children up for adoption through a process that is not legal nor ethical. McMorrow is beaten, shot at, and then is a possible suspect in a murder. McMorrow has a girlfriend, Roxanne, a social worker who lives in Portland. In the first book, we learn that they had recently met at a party in Portland hosted by an old friend of McMorrow s. They had had a few dates that had ended in bed, alternating between her brick apartment-with-a-view in Portland and his small rental in the woods with pretty much just necessities for furnishing. As McMorrow s life and home come under attack in Deadline, she is not sure how to deal with all the danger that surrounds him. At the end of Deadline, we are left wondering is Roxanne will stay with him. Indeed, at the start of book #2, it is clear she has left McMorrow to live and work in Colorado, but by the middle of the book she has returned to Maine and a job with Maine s child protective services agency. She gets a place in Portland; she says it s closer to her office, but her worry about the way McMorrow seems to attract danger better explains why she doesn t move in with him at his dilapidated deserted place on the dump road in Prosperity, a fictional town in Waldo County. Roxanne is smart, though, and her social work background is helpful as McMorrow investigates not only the material for his story on unwed high school mothers, but the solution to the murder in the story. (3) LIFELINE: As Lifeline begins, McMorrow has not done much additional freelancing, and seems satisfied to take bird-watching walks in the woods behind his ramshackle tiny rental house and drink a lot of beer. Roxanne insists that he would improve his disposition if he had some kind of regular work. So, mostly to please Roxanne, McMorrow accepts a part time job at the Kennebec Observer; he will report on the local court news on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On his first day in court, he meets a woman who files for a restraining order against her boyfriend. McMorrow feels badly that the woman gets little support from the judge and writes an article about the woman s troubles, without naming her. Nevertheless, the woman s boyfriend easily can tell (in such a small town) that the story is aimed at him. So he retaliates by picking a fight with McMorrow. When the woman is murdered, McMorrow blames himself. As the story progresses, McMorrow is frequently under attack by various ne er-do-wells from the backwoods. With Roxanne s help, he brings the case to resolution. Meanwhile, the Kennebec Observer has printed his columns relative to the courtroom cases, but over the increasing protest of the never-make-waves editor; so McMorrow quits. (4) POTSHOT: At the start Potshot, McMorrow and Roxanne are visiting a county fair and run into a booth manned by Bobby and Melanie Mullaney, proponents of legalizing pot. McMorrow sees the possibility of a freelance story, selling it to the Boston Globe on spec for $300. McMorrow is introduced to other legalization proponents and supporters of the Mullaneys. When he is led into the extreme northwestern part of the Maine wilderness and shown several very healthy marijuana plants, he realizes that it is mainly about financial gain. But nothing is quite what it seems to be. Right to the dangerous conclusion. Shortly after the start of Potshot, Roxanne is attacked and hospitalized by a dangerous client, a mother whose children Roxanne has placed in protective foster care. Thereafter,
Roxanne s safety in the hospital and her good recovery is a worry and distraction as he gets sucked into the vortex of the Mullaney s life. When McMorrow moves to Prosperity prior to book #2, he develops a close friendship with his closest (permanent) neighbors on the dump road a silver haired Marine and Vietnam War veteran Clair Varney and his wife Mary. The Varneys have a nice retirementfarm, replete with house, barn, gardens, and woodland a short walk from the property that McMorrow is renting from absentee landlord, Millie Tint, an artist living in New Mexico. The Varneys have their own out-of-state adult children and grandchildren, but they more-orless adopt McMorrow as part of their family. Although McMorrow helps Clair cut firewood, clearly McMorrow gets more in exchange, not the least of which is a skilled gunman that has McMorrow s back in a number of tense situations in books #2, 3, and 4. (5) BORDERLINE: McMorrow is on his own. The Varneys are visiting their daughter and grandkids in North Caroline where Clair agreed to have a needed gall bladder operation. Roxanne is in Florida tending to her Alzheimer s-afflicted mother in a nursing home. She is distraught and throughout the story, attempts to lean on her best friend through daily phone calls. Many calls go unanswered since McMorrow is distracted by the need to complete a freelance article for Historical Traveler magazine on the route that Benedict Arnold s army took, marching his army of 500 along the Kennebec River to attack Quebec in 1775. All of that is background to a mystery upon which McMorrow stumbles in the first few pages of Borderline and with which he becomes increasingly obsessed. A man gets off a tourist bus to use a rest room in a tiny village along the Kennebec River, and then disappears. McMorrow is there when it happens, yet he is amazed that no one seems to care about it. The more he tries to motivate the police, the more he alienates the small town police chief. And then a few of the town s ruffians imply that McMorrow is a trained agent and keep their distance. He is baffled, threatened, and cannot escape the clutches of the mystery. Borderline is rural noir at its best the plot is totally original, it s borderline crazy, and I really recommend it. (6) COVER STORY: Again, McMorrow is on his own, this time in New York City. He went down to accept a position as a New England stringer for the New York Times. While there, he has a drink with Casey, a childhood friend. That night, the NYC mayor is killed; in the morning, Casey is arrested for the mayor s murder and the police wonder if McMorrow was a partner in the crime. But there are powerful people who worry that Casey has given McMorrow secret but explosive information about past events in the city. Within hours, more people are killed and McMorrow, and all he holds dear, are threatened. Roxanne does not show up in person until after the plot s climax, and it is safe for them to be together. She comes to NYC for a few days visit. It seems that their relationship is finally on solid ground. The urban setting for Cover Story is different than the Maine backwoods, but Gerry Boyle handles it well and believably. Great story, suspenseful. I feel that each of the first 6 Boyle books get better and better.
MORE SETTING DETAILS Book Real Fiction 1. Deadline (1993): Androscoggin County Town of Androscoggin 2. Bloodline (1995) Waldo County Towns of Waldo (pop. 800) Belfast (6,700) Unity College, Unity ME Knox (806) Albion eastern edge of Kennebec County (2,050) Waterville- larger town (11,000) in nearby Kennebec County Town of Prosperity 3. Lifeline (1996) Waldo County Town of Prosperity Town of Kenebec 4. Potshot (1997) Somerset County Town of Farmington Town of Lewiston 5. Borderline (1998) Kennebec River Towns of Madison Skowhegan Embden, Solon Caratunk Jackman Quebec City 6. Cover Story (2000) New York City The Algonquin Hotel The [Parker] Meridien Hotel Town of Prosperity Town of Florence Town of Valley, MA [Lawrence, MA] Town of Prosperity Town of Scanesett Bull and Thistle Bar