WHAT I'VE BEEN READING

WILD THING – An Eddie Dancer Mystery
By Mike Harrison
ECW Press
ISBN 1-55022-719-X
May 2006
$28.95 Cdn
$24.95 US
287 Pgs.


For those of you who missed the first Eddie Dancer book, All Shook Up, don’t make the same mistake with this second book by Mike Harrison. Eddie Dancer is a private investigator out of Calgary who does things in his own way, and is more intelligent than most protagonists who hide bottles of scotch in their desks

When his good friend, Dr Peter Maurice, a renowned psychologist on a book tour of Great Britain, calls him for help, Eddie takes the first plane over. Dr. Maurice has been arrested for a series of horrible murders and needs Eddie’s investigative powers to prove the British police wrong.

Dr Maurice has purchased a two hundred year old manuscript from the great-great-granddaughter of Dr. Franz-Anton Mesmer, the father of hypnotism. The granddaughter is suddenly the first woman to die a horrible death at the hands of a serial killer whose methods are so torturous that even jaded police detectives are shocked. They call him “The Crusher”. And the killings don’t stop once Dr. Maurice is locked up.

Eddie unearths some horrifying information about Britain’s Newgate Prison, frequented by Mesmer but long ago burnt to the ground. Unlike some working the case, Eddie doesn’t believe this killer is a reincarnation of one of Mesmer’s patients. The combination of the paranormal, the British setting, the historical facts, and Eddie’s tactics, make for a richly textured story.

Eddie pursues the murderer with relentless passion and the ending is shocking. WILD THING is a hard-boiled private eye novel that will satisfy the most critical fans of the genre.




MIKE HARRISON’S first Eddie Dancer novel All Shook Up, was praised by Kirkus Reviews (“A hard-boiled shamus…a lively first read”) and Library Journal (“Dancer is tough and gutsy…essential reading”) He lives in Okotoks, Alberta.