1.28.2018   Novel’s character grapples with early dementia

Houston author Evan Moore has penned a sensitive, literate novel dealing with early onset dementia.

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Moonshine Cove Publishing, $13.99 paperback) tells the story of a 60-year-old weekly newspaper publisher who lives with his college-age son on the family’s Texas ranch. Ethan Breen realizes that he has symptoms of early dementia, which had struck both his father and grandfather, and he is considering killing himself as his father did. But he wonders: Can he actually go through with it when the time comes?

Ethan asks his son Kevin to accompany him on a road trip so he can visit some old friends and perhaps come to grips with something that has haunted him since high school. Along the way he tells Kevin stories about his life — some of them humorous, some poignant — that the young man had never heard.

A personal note: My father died from Alzheimer’s in 2000. Soon after he was diagnosed we went on a road trip together where he told me stories I had never heard before. So I found Evan Moore’s novel, which I read in two days, to be compelling and heartfelt.

Campus mystery: Judy Alter, who was director of TCU Press for twenty years and is a prolific author herself, has written a second murder mystery set on a mythical Texas university campus.

Pigface and the Perfect Dog (Alter Ego Publishing, $12.99 paperback) is the second in her new Oak Grove Mysteries series, following The Perfect Coed. Alter gets to the action right away as protagonist Susan Hogan confronts a rifle-packing customer in a grocery store, and by the third page a college student’s body has been found in a nearby pasture. The book drew a rave from fellow Texas mystery writer Susan Wittig Albert: “Judy Alter’s Perfect mysteries are just that — perfectly readable, suspenseful, and engaging. This one will keep you guessing to the very end.”

Private eye thriller: ESPN football analyst and author Paul Finebaum offers this endorsement of Jim Nesbitt’s private eye novel, The Right Wrong Number (Spotted Mule Press, $12.99 paperback): “Jim Nesbitt’s latest hard-boiled Texas thriller is another masterpiece. ‘The Right Wrong Number’ has everything to keep the reader turning the page — vivid characters, stark Texas landscape, non-stop action and a classic American anti-hero in Ed Earl Burch, Nesbitt’s battered but dogged Dallas PI. Buckle up and brace yourself for another wild ride.”

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Glenn Dromgoole has been writing his Texas Reads column since 2002, focusing on Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.