May 1, 2023
Private detective Adam McAnnis likely regrets agreeing to join an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York. The other guests are remarkably standoffish, one of them turns up dead just before a massive storm blows out the power, and that's just the start of the mayhem. An Emmy-nominated TV news producer, McDorman debuts with a mystery that reportedly takes a standard trope and then changes the rules. Prepub Alert.
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September 1, 2023
A metafiction that combines a murder mystery set at a storied upstate New York hunting club in the 1970s and lessons on the mystery genre; the author, MSNBC news producer McDorman, is making his fiction debut. Young private detective Adam McAnnis, a Vietnam veteran through whose "sad and wary" but amused eyes the story is told, has been hired by one of the guests at the club's annual Fourth of July gathering to investigate a possible plot against that guest. Until a female guest is found dead in the lake, an apparent suicide, there's no indication of anything untoward going on, except for some pot smoking and the adulterous couplings in two designated rooms in the clubhouse (in one of which McAnnis is happy to "interrogate" a straying wife). But murder is very much afoot, and as we are lectured in long, informed commentaries by the "author" of the mystery, "[a]ren't the suspense and anticipation the real secret thrill of the book?" There are examinations of plot and method and the first-person narrative technique ("a point of view you have viewed with suspicion ever since your first innocent reading of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"), as well as references to Shakespeare and Sophocles, Dashiell Hammett and Patricia Highsmith, "locked room" specialist John Dickson Carr and Thomas De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." While such material is interesting enough, it fails to resonate with this murder mystery, which concludes with the reader joining the cast of characters. An entertaining novel, but a tad too clever for its own good.
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September 1, 2023
McDorman enters the crime fiction arena as a former newspaper reporter and an Emmy-nominated TV news producer steeped in the traditions and history of the mystery genre. He presents a classic closed circle mystery set at a private hunt club with a "manicured killing ground" in upstate New York, an enclave owned by a complexly entangled coterie of wealthy and dysfunctional families. Adam McAnnis fits the bill for a just-scraping-by private eye, circa 1976; he's a philosophical, weed-smoking, PTSD-harried Vietnam vet skeptical about everyone and everything. McDorman simultaneously revels in and comments on the many-faceted plot as the narrator directly addresses the reader with the assumption that she is equally knowledgeable and ardent about mysteries, decanting intriguing insights into the genre and its luminaries, including Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Jorge Luis Borges. Readers will encounter a quiz, Q&As with the suspects, and a play. McDorman is funny, canny, and nimble in this clever, unusual, and enormously entertaining mix of criticism and suspense, this mystery propelled by witty banter, hidden trauma, messy affairs, and vicious schemes.
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September 18, 2023
McDorman’s wily debut breaks the fourth wall immediately, in a sign of the authorial shenanigans to come: “This murder mystery, like all murder mysteries, begins with the evocation of what the reader understands to be its atmosphere,” goes the opening line. From there, McDorman introduces private detective Adam McAnnis, who’s finagled an invitation to a weekend-long bicentennial celebration at the West Heart hunting club in Upstate New York, where his old college friend’s family owns a cabin. After McDorman establishes his large cast (in part through a half-redacted list of dramatis personae), the plot speeds up with a suspicious drowning and the accidental shooting of West Heart president John Garmond. Looking to get to the bottom of both deaths, McAnnis interviews his fellow lodgers one by one. As the story unfolds, the omniscient narrator intrudes to offer up tangents on subjects including murder mystery genre rules (“The key is a sense of fair play—a reader must not feel cheated”) and Agatha Christie’s famous 1926 disappearance. While these peregrinations may not appeal to mystery fans who prefer a more direct route from crime to solution, McDorman ensures they never come at the expense of satisfying twists or shocks. For readers willing to try something a little different, this is quite the diversion. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary.