Sat 17 Mar 2012
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: RICK BOYER – The Whale’s Footprints.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
Allen J. Hubin
RICK BOYER – The Whale’s Footprints. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1988. Ivy Books, paperback, 1989.
The Whale’s Footprints, the latest of the Doc Adams stories by Rick Boyer, has a well-developed plot and effective misdirection, but the characters seem to emote rather than feel and communicate.
Doc and Mary’s son Jack, studying whales at Wood’s Hole on Cape Cod, brings a friend, Andy, home for the weekend. But Andy dies in the night — someone has fiddled with his epilepsy medication. And the police rather think Jack might have been the fiddler.
Doc and Mary, enraged and horrified, begin exploring on their own. Andy, it develops, wasn’t quite the blameless young man he might have appeared. Not that this clears Jack. Oh, no….
Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.
The Doc Adams series —
Billingsgate Shoal (1982) [Edgar Winner, Best Novel, 1983]
The Penny Ferry (1984)
The Daisy Ducks (1986)
Moscow Metal (1987)
The Whale’s Footprints (1988)
Gone to Earth (1990)
Yellow Bird (1991)
Pirate Trade (1994)
The Man Who Whispered (1998)
March 17th, 2012 at 6:29 pm
I never enjoyed the books in this series as much as I thought I should, the two or three that I’ve read.
I have only myself to blame. Even though the books are billed as a “thriller,” a “suspense novel,” and a “mystery,” I always thought there ought to be more clues and detection in them, and there never was.
Maybe I just thought that a dentist or oral surgeon based in Massachusetts ought to have had more sedate adventures than he did!
March 19th, 2012 at 7:54 am
I never read any of the series, but I did enjoy Boyer’s 1976 Sherlock Holmes pastiche, THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA.
March 19th, 2012 at 9:07 am
That was Boyer’s first book. It’s kind of surprising to see that it came out six years before he began the Doc Adams series. I’ve always meant to read it, but as usual, I just never have.
Boyer also wrote A Sherlockian Quartet (Alexander Books, 1998), which contained GIANT RAT plus three more Holmes stories. It must have been a small press publisher. I’ve never seen a copy.
Otherwise he seems to have stayed with the Doc Adams series, mystery-wise, at least.