Monday, November 23, 2009

Loss Of Carrier by Russ White

Lately, Jess Wirth’s life has become as gray as the walls of his cubicle. He spends his days toiling as a network engineer in a North Carolina data center, nursing an ugly divorce that has left him with a decidedly sour outlook on dating. After coming into the office one Friday morning and discovering most of his coworkers playing hooky after a corporate party, he decides to skip out and spend a quiet day alone on the lake. But when a service call sends him into the building’s basement, he discovers his co-worker Carl dead, hanging from a tangle of Ethernet cables.

The police rule Carl’s death a suicide, but Jess isn’t convinced. He decides to check out the projects Carl was working on, but his plan is disrupted when another co-worker’s body turns up. Determined to ferret out the truth behind what he’s sure is a pair of murders, Jess redoubles his investigative efforts, despite a nearly successful attempt on his life. When he meets an enigmatic young woman named Leah, she takes an immediate interest in his theory and presses him to entrust her with the information he has collected. Wary of Leah’s motives yet inexorably drawn to her, Jess is reluctant to trust her…until a car tries to mow them both down in the street. The experience binds the pair closer, and Jess learns Leah is conducting an investigation of her own into the suspicious deaths. Together they realize they are on the trail of a dangerous criminal, someone who will stop at nothing to complete an elaborate data theft.

Loss of Carrier is engaging whodunit, complete with enough action, suspense, and intrigue to engage any fan of contemporary mysteries. Additionally, Christian readers will enjoy the novel’s positive portrayal of Christians interacting in the real world. Whatever their literary tastes, Russ White’s debut novel is sure to become a fast favorite among readers.


My Review:
Thank you to the author for my copy of this Christian fiction mystery. I learned a little technology as I read since the protagonist is a geek network engineer. Although it gets technical, explanations are given so that even I could understand.

It's disconcerting to trip across misspellings and grammatical errors, and unfortunately, this book contains some. In addition, the flow is a bit choppy. However, the compelling plot keeps the reader turning pages.

There's a scene where the protagonist and his love interest debate the merits of waiting for sex until after marriage.

If you would like to read the first chapter, click here.

If you would like to buy a copy, click here.

3 comments:

Musings of A Minister said...

Great review, as always.

L. Venkata Subramaniam said...

Looks like an interesting book. I like the part about the main protagonist being a network engineer. Maybe I can relate to that :)

I am surprised in this day when there is so much word processing support people still make spelling mistakes!

Anonymous said...

Delete Comment From: Book Critiques

Blogger Russ said...

I actually went through the manuscript again with Word's spell checker, and found _precisely_ four misspelled words in all 80,000 words of the book... One of those was a missed period, another a misplaced apostrophe. So, you must have eagle eyes to have spotted the .005% of all the words that were actually misspelled (!) :-) As for grammatical errors, Word only found one sentence it thought was in error--and Word was in error in that case (Word thought it should be "their," when it should be "there").

So, I don't know--maybe you received a copy of the book that's different than the one I sent to be printed, but in the original manuscript, there just aren't many errors of the type you describe.

:-)

Russ