Home Front - Hardcover

Rosenberg, Joel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 144540849X ISBN 13: 9781445408491

Publisher: MARKS & SPENCER, 2003

Synopsis

When aging, balding, copy editor Ernest "Sparky" Hemingway (no relation) gets a call from the daughter of his Vietnam buddy George Washington (also no relation), he is faced with a choice. He can head out to Minneapolis to help her out of a jam or hang up the phone—and this phone call has the potential to turn Sparky's life upside down. He's managed to erect a pretty effective cocoon around himself over the last few years, and no amount of aggravation (or thoughts about his long-gone ex-wife) can get through his very carefully nurtured shell. He's very comfortable living (well, maybe just existing) in the little North Dakota town of Hardwoods, filled with its decidedly odd folks who just do what they have to in order to get along, where everybody knows everybody else's secret but pretends they don't. He's left alone, and that's the way Sparky likes it.

But you don't walk away from a promise. Especially when that promise was made to somebody who pulled your butt out of more unfriendly and friendly fire than a hailstorm of June bugs. You don't ask, you just do.

His fellow vet buddy Doc Holiday (you guessed it, no relation) meets him in Minneapolis and tosses him a .45, which comes in handy when they run into a hard time with some gang-bangers who are after the girl in question. They rescue Washington's teenage daughter, Tenisha, and Doc and Sparky split up, Sparky taking Tenisha and her cat back to his place.

Between dealing with the aforementioned gang-bangers, the Minneapolis police, who are hassling Sparky, Doc's brain tumor, and the mostly white town Sparky lives in taking umbrage at the color of Tenisha's skin—not to mention having to haul a four-month-pregnant neighbor and her baby to his house for safety during a blizzard—Sparky thinks he's handling himself pretty well.

And then things start to get weird.

About this title

About the Author:

Joel Rosenberg was born in 1954. The author of many science fiction and fantasy novels, he is best known for his Guardians of the Flame fantasy series. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife Felicia, two daughters, one sister, five cats, one dog and a couple of dozen fish.

From Publishers Weekly:

If this first mystery from fantasy author Rosenberg (Not Exactly the Three Musketeers) were a movie, it might be titled "The Boyz in the 'Hood Take a Day Trip to Lake Woebegone." Ernest "Sparky" Hemingway, a 50-ish copyeditor living in Hardwoods, N.Dak., gets a call from the teenage daughter of his Vietnam buddy George "Prez" Washington (an officer with a strange sense of humor put them both in the same tank crew, along with a guy called Doc Holliday). Seems that Prez, a Minneapolis pharmacist, has been killed by some of that city's burgeoning crew of gangbangers and left instructions that Hemingway and/or Holliday (now practicing medicine in Indianapolis) were to be called to look after daughter Tenisha in the event of his death. After both Sparky and Doc rush to Minneapolis and anger a large number of gangstas and local cops, Sparky takes the scared, shy, sullen Tenisha home to Hardwoods, where the locals are astonished to find an urban black teenager in their midst. An FBI agent with a Vietnamese face and a Norwegian last name shows up, making mysterious noises about Prez and his daughter; then four young black males are found dead in a car not far from Hardwoods. Rosenberg's plotting has some intriguing twists, and his portrait of Sparky as a man smarter and tougher than he looks is interesting, but the disparate elements never quite gel into an exciting or entertaining whole.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: MARKS & SPENCER
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 144540849X
• ISBN 13: 9781445408491
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304