DEATH IN NOSTALGIA CITY, first in a series set in a very unusual venue

DEATH IN NOSTALGIA CITY (Nostalgia City Mystery series #1)
MARK S. BACON
Archer & Clark (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: He thinks he’s on edge now…then people start getting killed…

Uptight has been ex-cop Lyle Deming default setting for years, but his new job, driving a cab in a theme park, promises to cure his chronic anxieties. Nostalgia City is the ultimate resort for anyone who wants to visit the past. A meticulous recreation of an entire small town from the early 1970s, it’s complete with period cars, music, clothes, shops, restaurants, hotels—the works. The relaxed theme-park atmosphere is just what Lyle needs—until rides are sabotaged and tourists killed. Then park founder, billionaire “Max” Maxwell, drafts Lyle into investigating—unofficially. As the violence escalates and employees get rattled, Lyle gets help. Kate Sorensen, the park’s PR director—and former college basketball player—becomes another incognito investigator. Except that she’s six-foot-two-and-a-half-inches tall and drop-dead gorgeous. So much for incognito. Together, Lyle and Kate unravel a conspiracy of corporate greed and murder.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well, it's Deathtober...I had to fit this in somehow...the idea of a 1970s-themed amusement park broke me out in hives...pleather, leisure suits, orange shag carpet, my 1977 Gremlin X...

...I REFUSE to post a photo of myself in my blue-jeans suit with a green shirt, REFUSE do you hear!...so the idea of the book was amusing to me but not in the least bit credible.

Until I realized that two billionaires run their own space programs, and that my friends is so bloody absurd and incredible that I do not think anyone anywhere ever needs, or even should dare, to question even the silliest ideas for things that could exist.

Lyle the ex-cop and Kate the ex-basketball player and current PR maven are a pair of incredible (in the original sense) sleuths. Their billionaire boss basically forces them to work together to solve his industrial-espionage problem that has grown so out of hand that other people die as a result of the rivalry. When the miscreant is unmasked, your pearls will go unclutched.

That's not the point of the read.

Lyle, an ex-cop, lives with his dad in the eldercare residential bit of the Nostalgia City theme park. Think Celebration, Florida::Disneyworld for your model here. This is, in my never-humble opinion, a stroke of genius. Make a place where elderly people with tenuous or failing grasps on Reality of the twenty-first century can sink back into the times where they last felt on top of things, unchallenged by tech that confuses and intimidates them. So you can already see the reason such a place would come under sabotage by outside interests, right? There's quite a lot of money to be made in such a venture, so of course the interests already making money off the status quo do not want their cash flow threatened. And Max, Lyle and Kate's boss, has more than a few enemies....

Lyle's cop past gives him an "in" as is expected; Kate's attitude, fortitude, and honesty are her calling cards, people trust her and are correct to do so. She and Lyle forge a friendship not a romance...thank goodness for that...because they serve the same idea of ma'at, or Justice being done for harm caused. There is, unfortunately, some hint that Romance could be in their future. I hope the author will resist this temptation and allow Kate to be a person not a sex doll.

The series starting story's involving enough, and has a lot of fun side-alleys for future installments to go down. What makes me plan to read the next one, though, is the idea that for once a man and a woman are working together as colleaugues and friends without the tediously predictable complications of Romance gumming up the works.

So far, that is...stay tuned for further developments.