You can read Rick Boettger’s thoughtful review of FAIL in Key West’s Blue Paper here.
Also, following is novelist Rosalind Brackenbury’s perceptive review of my novel, published in Konk Life:
“When I attended the 2014 Key West Literary Seminar on “The Dark Side”, I learned some things about writers of crime fiction. They know how to do plots and they are good at endings. Also, they aren’t gloomy as people – far from it, they seem rather cheerful. Perhaps it’s because they know that what they are doing succeeds. Rick Skwiot’s crime novel, “Fail”, set in St. Louis, Missouri, falls squarely into the genre, with its mean streets, its corrupt bosses and its flawed, only-too-human detective.
“But he’s hit several very contemporary nails on their heads, too. The victim here is not a corpse – although one washes up in the great Mississippi – but a system of education that lets down inner city kids and sends them, most of them African-Americans, out into the wide world unarmed, at least by learning.
“His likeable cop, a demoted lieutenant who has made some mistakes in his past, is Carlo Gabriel – black, divorced, not entirely cynical, a lapsed but not totally lapsed Catholic, a snappy dresser with an eye for women and a taste for bourbon. (Do demoted cops in St. Louis earn salaries that allow for cashmere overcoats and Ferragamo loafers, I wondered?) He’s set here between a corrupt mayor with Mob connections and an idealistic white college professor who has lost his job and his wife and may be heading for the morgue on account of what he knows. Gabriel walks an uneasy line between the two, but helped by a Jesuit priest, Saint Anthony, patron of lost people and things, the ghost of Mark Twain and some fairly smart women, comes out on the right side even if he hasn’t changed the system. Stone, the professor, hasn’t changed the system either – but who knows, things may improve incrementally – and he has become a little less squeaky-clean and wide-eyed in the process of staying alive.
“Skwiot has a good ear for dialogue and an appropriately noir sense of humor, and the action cracks along at a satisfying rate. “Fail”, with its literary allusions, hints of Catholic morality as well as Machiavellian game-playing, its sense of place – Skwiot grew up in St. Louis, and the action takes place not far from Ferguson, a place we have all, unfortunately, heard of by now – was a page-turner even for this non-reader of detective fiction. What we look for on the page, whatever the genre, is surely intelligence. This short novel has it in quantities. Rick Skwiot has found his niche in among the best of American crime writers.”
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