When I was approached about reading Don Bruns' latest Mick
Sever novel, I thought I knew what to expect. I thought I'd get a
delicious bad
guy, one a reader just loves to hate. I thought I'd get a murky
mystery, since
Mick Sever is, first and foremost, a music journalist. He's not a
detective,
although he's not afraid to do some snooping.
I was wrong.
Just like Mick's last adventure, St. Barts Breakdown, Bahama Burnout places our hero in another recording studio. What differs here from the get-go is that this building is a character in the novel: the entire story revolves around it. Highland Studios is a legendary recording studio -- or, more appropriately, it was. A year previous to story's start, someone set fire to it. An unidentified body was found inside. And the last album recorded there, by famed band Johnny Run, didn't, ahem, meet expectations.
The action takes place a year later. The studio is rebuilt and it's Johnny Run who's currently recording. Déjà vu? Hardly. Mick Sever arrives on the scene, ready to write an article about how this phoenix of a recording studio is rising from its literal ashes. Circumstances quickly indicate that Mick might not get the easy, feel-good article he wants.
There are only two keys to the studio, possessed by the owners, Jonah and Rita Britt. Yet things are happening: tapes of recording sessions are erased, guitars are disappearing, pictures fall off walls and are destroyed. Rita's convinced all this is being done by the ghost of the unidentified person who died inside, but Jonah's more grounded. He's without answers, but ghosts aren't among his range of possibilities. It's got to be something else, something more.
Mick Sever, like any good reporter, can't resist asking the questions that'll help him discover these missing answers. And unlike St. Barts Breakdown, where the mystery was never fully solved, by the time the back cover comes to rest on the pages, all's revealed.
It's not what you'd guess. Bruns works a fantastic and totally plausible red herring into this story. And then Bruns unleashes another astonishing strength on us: the ability to bring a variety of characters into one location, all with valid reasons for being there. We readers watch what's going on, we know that something's about to happen, and we squirm with anticipation.
Best of all, what happens next is totally unexpected. It's also unintended, proving once again that the old maxim about mice and men is as true as ever.
While I missed the delicious characters that Bruns created in his earlier book, Bahama Burnout's got this amazing strength in its climax. The aftermath, too, doesn't unravel the way a reader might expect. It's clever, it suits the book's build-up, and yes, it tantalizes.
All in all, we can forgive a weaker set of characters when the plot is this delicious. That doesn't mean I can't wait to see the magic Mr. Bruns will give us when he finds a way to merge these two strengths. When he does, expect Mr. Bruns to have his long-overdue breakout novel.
Don't wait
for that. Pick up Bahama Burnout, or any of the Mick Sever books. Plop
yourself
down on a chair, pretend you're on the beach, and have some fun in the
Caribbean, Don Bruns style.