Cover Image: An Adventurous Night

An Adventurous Night

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Member Reviews

A truly diabolical premise with tension crackling off every page. A must-read for all who enjoy intelligently-written stories with great characterizations, and who enjoy surprise twists at every turn. A great addition to this genre, and highly recommended. I'll be reading more from this author!

*My sincerest thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me the privilege of reviewing an ARC at no charge.*

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This is a short read and as such rattles along at a really good pace.
The characters are entertaining.
Certainly held my interest and cannot wait to read more.

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A great hard-boiled mystery novel. Realistic characters to love and hate. Highly recommend!

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An Adventurous Night features so-called "soft-boiled private eye" Sammy Shovel in a story that takes place in San Francisco a little over a week before Christmas 1992. The author seems to have envisioned Sammy Spade as a sort of tongue-in-cheek homage to Sam Spade (Shovel - Spade. Get it?). He is apparently such a bad dresser that he is often mistaken for being a homeless person but is in possession of keen powers of observation and the ability to solve all manner of puzzles.

I wanted to like this novella. It seemed like a fun idea. Unfortunately the plot is all over the place and often incoherent. Characters pop in and out, sometimes it's not apparent if the person is actually in the room talking or if someone else is telling everyone something that the person had said previously.

At one point several people are in an interrogation room when a whole other group of people (cops and criminals) walk in and sidetrack the entire story for no apparent reason. What they are relating doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything, as if they just dropped in from another story (or perhaps a previous draft?) and then dropped back out again.

There is a lot of exposition with people telling other people what is apparently already known to them; such as "As you are aware..." "As you know..." with lots of information being repeated again and again. It reminded me at times of old-time radio shows when the audience couldn't see anything so they had to be told what was happening.

As far as the story goes there's something to do with a Hong Kong gang wanting to make a move into San Francisco and a local importer with connections to Hong Kong being approached by Hong Kong authorities and then the whole story just kind of goes screaming into the night.

Frankly, I can't recommend An Adventurous Night to anyone. While I applaud the author for the effort this material really isn't ready for publication.

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The start of a new series set in the 1990's with Sammy Shovel as a private investigator and ex-cop. Unfortunately not for me as I didn't particularly like the characters or the writing style.

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