The Hemingway Thief
Shaun Harris
Debut novel
Action-adventure
Seventh Street Books, 2016
Ebook $9.99
Print $15.95
Audio $24.99
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About the Book
Novelist Henry “Coop” Cooper is contemplating a new book
between sipping rum and lounging on a Baja beach with hotel owner Grady Doyle.
When Grady tries to save a drunk from two thugs, Coop tags along for the sake
of a good story. The drunk is Ebbie Milch, a small-time thief on the run in
Mexico because he has stolen the never-before-seen first draft of Ernest
Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast from a wealthy rare book dealer. The stolen
manuscript is more than just a rare piece of literary history. It reveals clues
to an even bigger prize: the location of a suitcase the young, unpublished
Hemingway lost in Paris in 1922. A year’s worth of his stories had vanished,
never to be seen again. Until now. But Coop and Grady aren’t the only ones with
their eyes on this elusive literary prize, and what starts as a hunt for a
legendary writer’s lost works becomes a deadly adventure. For Coop this story
could become the book of a lifetime . . . if he lives long enough to write it.
My review
I went to see a library program featuring Mr. Harris talking
about his novel, and bought the mystery. The novel is a slapstick, satirically
voiced and rollicking Mexican adventure filled with every cliché, plenty of
booze and mild drug use, and locker room talk.
A down and out successful pop culture campy-vampire romance
writer has run out of steam and takes a trip to the back side of Mexico’s
popular tourist resorts where he stumbles across compadres willing to look for
adventure. The hippie hotel owner and his cohorts agree to solve a legendary
mystery when the descendant of a man who stole Ernest Hemingway’s suitcase of
manuscripts nearly a hundred years earlier shows up on the lam and beaten.
Ebbie Milch is a fourth or fifth generation conman and his story is full of
more holes than he is. Yet Coop, whose alter-ego vampire detective is after a “real”
literary tale, becomes obsessed with finding the case when he reads what he
takes as clues to its whereabouts in a stolen manuscript Milch produces.
People who know people become the key to gain admittance to
various cartels as Harris introduces fabulous underground boxing rings run by
scary nationals, an acclaimed hit woman who has it in for her spurned lover who
happens to be one of Coop’s gang of four, and a descendant of John Wilkes Booth,
yes, that one, are among the many lost and found souls that create a background
for the literary adventure Coop wants to create. The journey is a bloody Larry,
Moe, and Curly production which waxes eloquent toward the end.
The Hemingway Thief is a romp for those who like big guns,
rum with a side of tequila, the good kind of weed, a Mexican adventure, and
aren’t fazed by a limited vocabulary of repeated four-letter words.
While I wasn’t looking for typos and Lord knows am not
throwing stones, and turned down a contract by a company who refused to fix
such errors after publication, I am disappointed by several instances of
missing periods and quotation marks from this Simon and Schuster imprint.
About the Author
Shaun Harris grew up the son of a homicide detective in
Southern New England. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with
degrees in both American Studies and Film and Television. As such he has a
crippling obsession with Fighting Irish Football. He lives in Wisconsin with
his wife, two kids, and a dog. Jim Rockford is his spirit guide. The Hemingway
Thief is his first novel.
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