DANIEL BOYD – Easy Death. Hard Case Crime, trade paperback, November 2014.

   I’m going to repeat the opening paragraph of the comments I wrote about the same author’s very first book, ’Nada, published back in 2010, to wit: I have a semi-formal, strictly unwritten and not always enforced policy against reviewing books written by authors I know personally. But that shouldn’t stop me from telling you about them, now should it? No, I didn’t think so.

   And so. The author’s name on the title page is Daniel Boyd, but that’s a pen name of one of the regular contributors to this blog’s pages. I don’t think it’s a secret, so I don’t think anyone will mind my telling you, including Dan Stumpf, the man behind the moniker and whose reviews of movies, westerns and crime novels just like this one you often see here.

   So this isn’t a review, not quite, but if I start out by telling you, as a regular visitor to this blog — and even if you’re not — that if you haven’t gone out and bought this book already, you should, and that’s a fact.

   The story takes place in a ten hour period following an armored car heist in December 1951, just before Christmas. I kind of assumed that the small town where most of the action takes place in and around was in Ohio. I don’t know where I could have gotten that idea, since a quick skim through right now didn’t turn up anything I could find, one way or the other. In fact it may have been somewhere in the Northeastern portion of the country, but what I did find was a reference to a Carnegie Library.

   Well, they had one of those in my own home town, clear up in the northern extremes of Michigan’s lower peninsula, but I guess it could be anyplace where a blizzard might dump up to three feet of snow.

   Which causes all kinds of havoc, including, and especially so, to the pair of robbers and their boss, a gent by the name of Bud Sweeney, the owner of a local used car lot. Of the two fellows who actually holds up the armored car, one is black, the other white, and the relationship between the two men — they are friends — is as much of the story as what it is that goes wrong.

   Or if I could expand on that, the story is about people, big shots in town and the ones just scraping by, the new lady park ranger — the first woman ever on the job — doctors who love their work and others who maybe don’t, and more.

   But don’t get me wrong. It’s about an armored car heist gone bad, as I said up above, or this book wouldn’t have been published by Hard Case Crime. The book is only 240 pages, just over Gold Medal length, and it can be read in only two or three hours, once you get going on it.

   And you should. My opinion, anyway.