Book Review: Henry Wood Detective Agency: Perception (Book 3)

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Book 3 in the Henry Wood serial and both Mr Meeks and the character are maturing into their stride.  I enjoyed the first two books, I did, as evidenced from my previous reviews but this one, to use a Henry Woodism, (or as I imagine he would say) Mr Meeks has just, "knocked it out of the ballpark", he really has.

I have been watching, on and off, another one of those American TV imports recently, not an avid watcher, but tune in now an again to The Americans which is set in the 50's and 60's and has Russian spies embedded in US Society.  Last week and I wasn't paying too much attention to it but I think part of the story was about the Russians trying to get their hands on US naval submarine technology as the US were making vast strides in improving the quality of their 'pipes' and what not, allowing their submarines to go even deeper than they could at that time and of course the Russians were desperate to get their hands on this material and of course the plans......

Well, switch off the telly folks and turn to Mr Meeks cos, he tells it a whole lot better, did the script writers get a hold of  Henry Woods Perception or were they just looking at the same historical info at the same time and did a poorer job of retelling it, you decide but my money is on Mr Meeks being a better story teller.

Celine is now firmly embedded as Henry's boss, I mean secretary but is soon demoted from boss, I mean secretary when Mr Buttons turns up and takes over as head of the office.

Big Mike of the NYPD has been promoted to detective and Bobby, well he is still a bit of an anachronism, although we do learn one of his little secrets.

Francis is still a food critic and now wants to write a novel, don't we all .....

Lawrence, one of the kids from the last book is back and it looks like Henry may be getting a new sidekick .....

And Luna is still enticing Henry with goodies from the bakery, he'll need to watch his waistline in future episodes ........

The cupboard in the basement continues to spill out 'clues' from the future, in this outing a DVD and a CD,  both of Billy Joel from the 70's, but we are no nearer to discovering the provenance of this contraption, how Henry came by it, where it came from or from whom, I suspect Bobby has something to do with it but Mr Meeks is keeping us guessing and as usual the clues are pretty abstract and thank goodness Henry gets there in the end because I never figure them out on my own .....

Anyways,  Henry is engaged by the personal secretary of Daniel Kupton who has recently thrown himself out of a window of the Woolworth Building.  Amy Silverton doesn't believe that it was suicide, he had a wife, he had a mistress and the fortunes of the family business had been turned around and was again making money and would make even more through being awarded a new Naval contract.......

Henry takes the job and the cold war intrigue really begins, we even get to sit in on a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev and the chairman of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin.  The CIA are operating on US soil, oops and the FBI are sniffing around, bodies are piling up and Henry is racing to save not only himself but those close to him, who is gonna kill him first, the CIA or the KGB ......

Perception turned a corner for Mr Meeks, his writing has improved tremendously and the dialogue is much crisper although a few more contractions wouldn't go amiss and he still needs just a tiny bit little more work on editing, but nothing too much to complain about and  character development is excellent, can't wait for number 4 in the series now .....

Editing for Kindle: 4 out 5
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5
Chapters: 90
Page length: 283

Book Review: Henry Wood Detective Agency Time and Again (Book 2)

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Book 2 in the Henry Wood Detective Agency series, Time and Again was every bit as good as the first, my review of that first book is here in fact Mr Meeks, or Brian to me, as I follow him on Twitter at @ExtremelyAvg seems to be getting into his stride and I actually enjoyed this one even more than the first, which clearly bodes well for number three in the series....

So, we are still in 50's New York and Henry has settled in to his new office in the Flatiron building with some of the quirky characters, such as Bob, turning up here again , this time helping Henry in a new case.

Can it be called  new case though.  Henry receives a visit from one of New York's finest telling him that he needs to come with him, there's been an accident!

On arrival at the scene of the accident Henry learns the news that his mentor and boss, Michael Thomas Moore a PI, who trained Henry in Detective work, is the victim of a hit and run, while that in itself is a crime, the police are looking at it as an accident.

It doesn't take Henry long to look at it as a crime, a street full of parked cars and where the only gap is, a bunch of dog ends discarded from someone sitting in a car ... waiting and watching.

Henry asks to look at the body and lifts Mickey's note book from it to look at later.

Henry soon discovers that his old boss, mentor and friend hasn't changed his ways and that the notes of the case he was working on are all in code but he does discover that he was working on a case that involved the shady side of the art world with secretive collectors who were willing to pay vast sums for black market art.  Interestingly and as an aside I recently watched The Monuments Men at the cinema and Mr Meeks does touch on this in this book, without actually referring to that film title, I suspect, like the rest of us he did not know of their existence while researching for this one but he does describe what was happening to works of art during WWII in the same way as the movie, which makes for a contemporary and fascinating link!

An old flame appears on the scene, well not really, more a case of unrequited love on Henry's part which complicates the mix and a secret auction being set up to buy a piece of lost art that most people, even in the art world, had never heard of.  Henry finds he needs to call in reinforcements and enlists the help of Big Mike, from book 1, who has accumulated leave from the NYPD and Professor Dr Brookert from NYU. He even manages to get a secretary to manage his life, I mean office, and things begin to pick up in that area but the case has more twists than a spiral stair case.

The strange cabinet in Henry's wood work cellar makes a couple of appearances disgorges clues once again, but Henry so wrapped up in the case and the reappearance of Katarina in town, that he misses the first set of clues, which he believes, had he found them, may have prevented Mickey's death and this troubles him greatly.  I'm sure that in book three, or at least I hope, in book three that the mystery of this time shifting magic cabinet will be explained and while it is an anomaly it somehow doesn't seem to out of place here!

Mr Meeks does need to slow down a little and maybe take a little more time in editing, before pushing the upload button to find and correct the few minor errors sprinkled throughout, but and I do emphasise that they were  minor, they did not detract from the overall enjoyment of the story.  My only criticism of the story line would probably come at the end of chapter 54 leading into chapter 55.  I finished off the chapter started the new one and then had to go back as I thought I had missed either a chapter or at least a couple of paragraphs as some of the main characters were being followed to a destination and then suddenly seemed to have somehow been kidnapped by other unknown characters.  It did confuse a little but did become clear in the end!

All in all, another good book from Mr Meeks and Henry Wood ......


Editing for Kindle /iPad: 4 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5
Page length on kindle /iPad: 225 with proper page numbers too. Oh what joy....
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

Book Review: Henry Wood Detective Agency By Brian D Meeks

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This is first in a planned three books on Henry Wood by Meeks.  It was a strange wee read, but not in a bad strange way.

Henry Woods is a Private Investigator who likes, when not investigating, to dabble in woodwork, he lives and works in New York and the year is 1955, just....

While recovering from New Year celebrations in his office, a woman enters; her father is missing and she needs Henry to find him..

As it turns out a second female client also has a father who is also missing and Henry has good vibes about one but not the other.  The missing fathers are an accountant and the other an inventor and Henry soon finds that their disappearance is linked with, it is alleged, the accountant having been keeping a secret coded journal on one of New York's mobster family Bosses...

Everyone is looking for both men, the journal and the codex that will unlock the information, and as the boss of the family is not liked by the other bosses who sense a weakness, this starts a killing war around the city with the other families trying to weaken and be ready to take over Tommy The Knife's area, if and when the DA and police get a hold of the journal and the codex.  Tommy will either be dead, or in prison.....It's a race to find it and the codex and of course the missing men while trying to stay out of the firing line and remain alive in the process....

The strangeness of the book comes in the form of a cupboard in Henry's woodworking workshop, nearly every time he opens the cupboard he finds things.  Clues to the case, objects and books from the future, including a DVD on cabinet making (if memory serves) but I wasn't clear if he got the player to go with it, but the whole thing is not fully explained.  I have spoken with Mr Meeks on Twitter and he informs me that all will be revealed in future books as to how  this arose and why,  and all will become clear.

So, we have a murder mystery suspense book set in 1955 with a bit of 'time travel' thrown in with these 'strange objects' and messages appearing inexplicably from the future. We have a real estate agent who after Henry's office is burned down is ready and waiting to rent him a new office, an office with an address on a business card that is given to Henry, while he is still in the first office, but do you know what, as strange and as disconcerting as the lack of understanding for these things occurring, it did not detract from the overall flow of the story of a detective trying to track down a couple of missing men while being dogged by the mob.  There were a couple of interesting characters the mob lieutenant Sal, for one and I loved this bit, a great line, 'Sylvia's expression was easy to read, so Sal continued, “My day job is being a thug; by night, I am a secret literary critic who saves people from poor prose." '

This isn't a long read lasting only for 212 pages, formatting on ipad and Kindle seemed fine and I had no real issues with it. There were a couple of spelling / grammatical/ missing words, three, I think,  that stood out, which I'm sure will be fixed in an update.  Over all a good read and he has probably dragged me back in to find out how and why the time travelling objects are appearing and their overall significance to Henry

Editing for Kindle: 4 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5
Plot: 4 out of 5
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5

You can connect with Mr Meeks at:  https://twitter.com/ExtremelyAvg
and on his web site at: http://extremelyaverage.com/