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The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse (1999)

par Keith Hartman

Séries: Gumshoe (Book 1)

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1923140,475 (3.92)12
Welcome to 21st century Atlanta. During your stay, depending on your tastes, you can cruise gay midtown (I hear that the Inquisition Health Club has introduced manacles and chains to the aerobics class) or check out the Reverend-Senator Stonewall's headquarters at Freedom Plaza (watch out for the Christian Militia guarding it, though) or attend a sky-clad Wiccan sabbat (by invitation only). Avoid the courthouse, where the Cherokee have turned out in full war-paint to renegotiate a nineteenth century land deal. Also stay away from all cemeteries, at least until the police find out why someone is disinterring and crucifying corpses. As you can tell, this is a lively novel, full of intricate plotting and engaging off-beat characters. Among the latter are a gay detective, a Wiccan family, an ambitious televangelist with an eye on the White House, an artist whose medium is flesh and blood, a Cherokee drag queen--and then there's poor Benji, who would just like to make it to his fifteenth birthday, assuming the MIBS don't get him first or his Baptist parents don't ground him for life because his new girlfriend is a witch. Picked as one of the eight best mysteries of 1999 by The Drood Review of Mysteries. Winner of Two Spectrum Awards ("Best Novel" and "People's Choice") Nominated for Two Lambda Awards ("Best Science Fiction / Fantasy Book" and "Best Men's Mystery".)… (plus d'informations)
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» Voir aussi les 12 mentions

3 sur 3
This book has won a plethora of awards. "Different", barely begins to describe it...but not a "bad" different...just an interesting, enticing "different" that only causes you want to read more because you need to see what type characters are going to appear next. The book was written in 1999...I'm reading it in 2023. Not that I doubt that everyone has the ability to deduce that that is a 24-year difference...you may have forgotten that in those 24 years, a lot of the things wrote about here, have changed...yet some elements of the story seem a bit too close to the happenings of today...that is in no way a positive testament. Hartman delves into the Satanic Panic craze of the 80s and 90s that managed to produce a society that is segregated by the self-appointed religious crusaders whose mantra is “ONE Nation Under God” (the emphasis on "One" is the author’s), and everyone else is labeled blasphemers and occultists and devil worshipers. Oh...and the term "gay", for which it seems that there were even genetic tests for...is applied to random groups that I won't mention here. Schools, neighborhoods and almost everything else is regulated and segregated by religious/spiritual practices. A person that is running for the office of the presidency is willing to incite a "holy war," using his Christian Militia to achieve his goals...and of course there are some people who would not only like, but are more than willing, to take him down by whatever means. After we wade through all this, we now find that we have a missing person that has connections to the Gumshoe, the Witch...of the book title. The greater mystery, however, involves the other title character...the corpse. The exhumation and occult-style desecration of the corpse, and a subsequent series of murders with ritualistic elements that leads both the public and the police to deem them satanic in nature. All that, and now we have the question of how a fourteen-year-old boy fits into it all? The Gumshoe, the Witch who by the way...is a transgender Native American Shaman, the Police, the Senator...who is also a preacher...and a host of other characters are in on various parts of this cat-and-mouse race to find the killer, which is where the story gets more interesting. As you have probably figured out if you have plowed through this far, is that it takes every ounce of patience and perseverance to get there...but as I finished, I was glad I stuck with it until the end...otherwise, I would have always wondered. The main things I found hard to deal with had nothing to do with the author's writing abilities or the story. It was the editing...or lack of said editing... was subpar at best. Twenty-four years and NOBODY corrected it??? The second factor is that for the first quarter of the book, I really had no idea what I was reading. I actually had to go back and read the blurb. I hope the author's version of "near-future" is only in his head and has no hope of becoming yours and my reality. The entire idea is nightmare producing...especially as our society comes closer and closer to making this work of fiction, non-fiction. ( )
  Carol420 | Jun 25, 2023 |
Just how did the author keep them all straight? I bet he had a wall chart or something, with cross indexing. I'm impressed.

This book is full of interesting characters. We get first person perspectives from the Gumshoe Drew Parker, his partner, Jen late into the book, the Chosen Benji, his girlfriend Summer, her mother the Witch (whose name escapes me), the Reverend Senator Zacharia Stonewall, the Artist, the Singer, the Cherokee Shaman, the Police ... you get the picture. Each has his or her own character, distinguishable in tone and voice and you could almost read the book just by each character's part. Almost, but each story interweaves with the others in a nice flow which is surprisingly clear and easy to follow, though the mystery at the heart of the story is plenty twisty enough you don't find out exactly who did what.

To top it all off, we get criss-crossing of genre boundaries in free fall. I wish more authors would do this: there's a little bit of science fiction (it's set in the near future of 2025, artificial wombs, cloning and bio-shaping are the norm), fantasy/New Age (Wiccans who can do magic), a police procedural/detective fiction, social/religious commentary, politics, shamanism (I want to know what my totem is now) ... you name it, this book has it all, even a bit of espionage. ( )
  fuzzipueo | Apr 24, 2022 |
This book does a magnificent job of world-building. There's no info-dump; the author doles out information about the setting and how it works as needed, in a way that never jarred me out of the story. I'm jealous.

The setting itself is a little scary, and entirely too conceivable: a US that is torn along sectarian lines, where the Baptists rule parts of metro Atlanta and have their own news network, where Nation of Islam, Mormons, Wiccans and witches (whose magic is real), and other faiths keep a wary eye on each other and one hand on their weapons of choice, and it feels like it's going to boil over any minute now. What makes this even scarier is that the book was published in 2009, but it feels like it's building on the relatively current situation here.

The story itself...I'l admit, it took me a while to really get into it. The whole thing is first-person, with more than have a dozen POV characters; one winds up dead about two-thirds of the way through and another is the guy behind the whole thing. Each of the characters has their own story, and none of them seem to have anything to do with the others. The threads gradually start to weave together about half-way through, and by the time the book hits the home stretch (say, the last 20% or so), it's all one disconcerting puzzle where the pieces come together from several different directions. (Again, jealous.)

Some of the background characters came off as a little trope-ish, which is probably part of why it didn't get the fifth star, but it wasn't enough to make me go "Seriously?" and it didn't really register as trope-ish until just now.

All in all, not the best book I've read so far this year, but certainly in the top two. And I'm definitely going to get the sequel. ( )
  writersaurusrex | Jan 28, 2021 |
3 sur 3
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For my parents, who gave me a love of books, a good education, and a surprising amount of understanding when I dropped out of my Ph.D. program to become a starving writer.
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Welcome to 21st century Atlanta. During your stay, depending on your tastes, you can cruise gay midtown (I hear that the Inquisition Health Club has introduced manacles and chains to the aerobics class) or check out the Reverend-Senator Stonewall's headquarters at Freedom Plaza (watch out for the Christian Militia guarding it, though) or attend a sky-clad Wiccan sabbat (by invitation only). Avoid the courthouse, where the Cherokee have turned out in full war-paint to renegotiate a nineteenth century land deal. Also stay away from all cemeteries, at least until the police find out why someone is disinterring and crucifying corpses. As you can tell, this is a lively novel, full of intricate plotting and engaging off-beat characters. Among the latter are a gay detective, a Wiccan family, an ambitious televangelist with an eye on the White House, an artist whose medium is flesh and blood, a Cherokee drag queen--and then there's poor Benji, who would just like to make it to his fifteenth birthday, assuming the MIBS don't get him first or his Baptist parents don't ground him for life because his new girlfriend is a witch. Picked as one of the eight best mysteries of 1999 by The Drood Review of Mysteries. Winner of Two Spectrum Awards ("Best Novel" and "People's Choice") Nominated for Two Lambda Awards ("Best Science Fiction / Fantasy Book" and "Best Men's Mystery".)

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