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Review
"This sequel to If Looks Could Kill is even better: funny, fast and smart...
Blair has a great eye for the small details of place, and his view of Vancouver is a delight. McCall and gang are terrific characters who really click in this slick, smart book."
Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail, February 18th 2006
Overexposed is Blair's follow-up to the Chapters/Robertson Davies Prize-nominated If Looks Could Kill, which I enjoyed very much. Overexposed, his third mystery, is possibly better. McCall is a likeable character, a man struggling to make a living and to maintain contact with his daughter despite the fact that she lives halfway across the country...
The plot seems simple at first, but it soon develops into something far more twisted and complex. The main plot, that of identifying the dead man on Tom's roof and learning how he died, morphs into a dangerous game involving stolen diamonds, with a sidebar on drug smuggling. A subplot begins mostly as a romantic diversion, but it too turns into something criminal... It's this organic growth that holds the reader's interest. That, and Blair's sense of humour. (***** out of 5)
Catherine Thompson, Telegraph-Journal, February 18, 2006
"Michael Blair is back with his second Tom McCall yarn. With any luck (reinforced by publisher Dundurn labeling the series Granville Island Mysteries) mayhem will soon be as familiar to owners of small Vancouver businesses as over-demanding clients and meeting the bi-weekly payroll...
Blair lives in Montreal but he evokes his west-coast location with the clarity of someone who longs to be there, at least through winter. As a freelance technical writer, he is particularly skilled at describing the subtle strategies of operating a small business, but the book's main strength is as a funny and solid entertainer, crisply written and eagerly read."
Kevin J. Schooley, Murder Out There (www.murderoutthere.com)
"This is a Granville Island mystery, and Overexposed is a very nifty little thriller and mystery, from a most intelligent voice in Canadian writing. Michael Blair is not new to the writing game, having been a finalist in 1999 for the Chapters/Robertson Davies Prize for If Looks Could Kill.
Overexposed has been noted as a sequel to If Looks Could Kill, and it keeps the same frantic pace and tension as the original. Tom McCall a photographer in Vancouver, happens to find a corpse on the roof of his floating home. The man has no identity it seems, as no one knows him or where he came from.
This is the beginning of the puzzle, and mixed with this, he is dealing with clients who are not too sociable, and just when he thinks life is sane, there are the mutilated dolls showing up at his door. Can the world get any more insane? Just wait and see!"
Shelf Life, March-April 2006
"Using locations that include Granville Island, Sea Village, Bridges Pub, Harbour Ferries Marina and the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, Michael Blair's third mystery novel, Overexposed (Dundurn, 2006) concerns a commercial photographer who wakes with a hangover to discover women's underwear in his dishwasher and a corpse on the roof of his floating home. Blair's preceding mysteries are If Looks Could Kill and A Hard Winter Rain. He lives in Montreal."
BC Bookworld, Sping 2006
"...there's never a dull moment, but somehow the dead stranger haunts him and the houseboat. Other strangers keep showing up to grill McCall about the episode, and soon unexpected links begin to appear...
It's a mixed up tale but a pretty good read, strengthened by solid roots in its setting. McCall seems like a good guy to know."
Jenni Mortin, Star Phoenix, April 1st 2006
"Lots of action, lots of suspense and well drawn characters you'll enjoy following as they move through the story. Talented author Michael Blair has written a winner, a book sure to please any mystery fan. Highly recommended. Enjoy. I sure did."
Anne K. Edwards, MysteryFiction.Net
"There is maximum suspense, minimal blood and gunplay, all without a soaring body count.
If Overexposed seems more lifelike, more genuine and less contrived than any number of bloodthirsty American mystery novels, it is. An astonishingly good read.
Can't wait for more from Michael Blair."
Paul Marck, The Edmonton Journal
"Blair keeps all the threads neatly untangled until the dénouement, which is satisfying - and very Canadian. His workmanlike prose never gets in the way of the story, and he has a deft way with dialogue. One can only hope that there are more Tom McCall stories in the works." (Margaret Goldik Montreal Review of Books )
"This sequel to if Looks Could Kill is even better; funny, fast and smart." (Globe and Mail )
"The best part of this sequel (to If Looks Could Kill) is the main character who comes across as the typical good-guy Canadian--strong, quiet and smart. That and Blair's strong writing style create a winning combination." (The Record (Kitchener, Cambridge, Waterloo, ON) )
Product Description
Just when Vancouver commercial photographer Tom McCall thought he'd got his life back on track, a complete stranger shows up dead on the roof deck of his floating home. No one seems to know who he is, he has no ID, and there's not a mark on him. If that isn't bad enough, a prospective new client seems to have had one Botox injection too many, his ex-wife wants to take his daughter off to Australia for a year; and someone's leaving mutilated dolls on his front step.
And, of course, he's in lust again.
No wonder he's feeling a little overexposed.
(20060218)
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Pleasant Diversion Set in Beautiful Vancouver,
By
This review is from: Overexposed: A Granville Island Mystery (Mass Market Paperback)
"Overexposed," by Michael Blair, is set around Granville Island in Vancouver, and concerns the trials and tribulations of commercial photographer Tom McCall, who on the day after his 40th birthday discovers the body of a stranger on the roof deck of his houseboat. Nobody knows who the man is, but a number of individuals start turning up to make life difficult for time because they appear to be certain that Tom knows about a mysterious package that the stranger allegedly had. Of course, Tom has no idea what is going on, but that doesn't prevent him from trying to figure it all out. Meanwhile, an old friend comes to stay with him, his ex-wife is planning to take their daughter to Australia for a year and a new client at work seems to be playing him for a fool. All just daily life for Tom, it seems.... This is evidently the third novel in a series that I've not run across before, but although the author refers to the plots of the other two books from time to time, I didn't find it necessary to search those out before being able to read this one. Definitely a lightweight story, but I enjoyed it, particularly because I know the areas of Vancouver that are described in the book and so I could picture the locations well. I doubt that I'll go out of my way to find the other two novels, but if I ran across them I think I'd pick them up....
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lightweight but acceptable mystery from the Beaver Pile,
By L. E. Cantrell - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Overexposed: A Granville Island Mystery (Mass Market Paperback)
This is--despite the fact that the protagonist is a man--effectively a cosy mystery set in Vancouver, British Columbia, the city in which I happen to reside.
The author, Michael Blair, demonstrates a certain amount of professional competence. Nevertheless, it is evident that he his still early in his journeyman days as a novelist. His basic wordsmithing is solid, if not particularly memorable. He has the typical cosy characters all firmly in place: the protagonist, Tom McCall, who is the owner of a small business, his slightly ditzy sidekick, his obnoxious sister who turns out--maybe--to be not so bad after all, the over-talkative local cop (who is like no VPD constable I've ever encountered, but that's almost to be expected in a cozy.) The story, such as it is, revolves around the unknown middle-aged man who had crashed the protagonist's fortieth birthday party. When, on the following morning and still a bit bleary-eyed from the previous night's revels, Tom McCall stumbles up toward the dock of his floating home (NOT, we are emphatically informed, his "houseboat"), he discovers Mr. Mysterious is still aboard, sitting lifeless on the roof, and generally making himself about as inconvenient as an uninvited corpse can be. As the plot progresses, it becomes evident that Mr. Unknown may or may not have been in possession of a valuable McGuffin that he may or may not have hidden someplace, perhaps with the increasingly exasperated protagonist. Needless to say, the existence of a McGuffin in a mystery story implies the presence of shadowy, dubious and dangerous characters in hot pursuit of it. Mr. Blair is already a good enough writer to recognize quality when he writes a knock-off, so "Overexposed" boasts of an antepenultimate scene that is recognizably akin to one of Dashiell Hammett's most famous and brilliant efforts. "Overexposed" explores no new ground, contains at least one supposed twist that should be almost painfully obvious to any true mystery fan from the very moment the preliminary groundwork is laid for it, and introduces no particularly memorable characters. Nevertheless, it is well-enough done that I have reasonable hopes that author Blair will advance his skills with each of the inevitable sequels to come. Hardly great, but still good--that seems worth four stars to me. |
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