october
1-31, 2014
Virtual Book Tour
About The Book
Title: The
Baker's Men
Author:
Donald Levin
Publisher:
Poison Toe Press
Publication Date: April 20,
2014
Pages: 338
ISBN: 978-0615968568
Genre: Mystery
/ Crime Fiction / Police Procedural
Format:
Paperback, eBook, PDF
Easter, 2009. The nation is still reeling from the previous
year’s financial crisis. Ferndale Police detective Martin Preuss is spending a
quiet evening with his son when he’s called out to investigate a savage
after-hours shooting at a bakery in his suburban Detroit community. Was it a
random burglary gone bad? A cold-blooded execution linked to Detroit’s drug
trade? Most frightening of all, is there a terrorist connection with the Iraqi
War vets who work at the store?
Struggling with these questions, frustrated by the dizzying
uncertainties of the case and hindered by the treachery of his own colleagues
who scheme against him, Preuss is drawn into a whirlwind of greed, violence,
and revenge that spans generations across metropolitan Detroit.
Book Excerpt
The man hurried along the
sidewalk on the other side of the street with both hands clasped on top of his
head. He looked like he was trying to keep his scalp from floating away.
“Hold it, baby,” Jared
Whalen murmured into his cell phone.
He watched the man lurch
past the cooling units of the Foodland, then dodder out of his line of vision.
He had parked his scout car in the lot of the Ethiopian restaurant across from
the supermarket to make his call.
Burly in his Kevlar and
with close-cropped blond hair, Whalen put the cruiser in gear and eased up to
the edge of Nine Mile Road. The financial meltdown of the previous year brought
a spike in B&Es around Ferndale and neighboring Pleasant Ridge, so they
were all warned to be alert for anything unusual.
Case in point: this guy.
As he watched, the man
continued down the sidewalk, more or less in a straight line.
Seems harmless, Whalen
decided, and settled back. This character might just be a bit tipsy, maybe got
over-served at Rosie O’Grady’s down the street and started to walk home. At
least he wasn’t lit to the point where he was weaving all over the place so
he’d step into traffic and become Whalen’s immediate problem.
“What’s the matter, sugar?”
the woman on the phone said. “Nothing more to say to me?”
Whalen smiled at the
petulance in her voice. He turned his attention from the man on the sidewalk
and pictured her pillowy red lips drawn in the pout he loved. He met her last
Valentine’s Day when he stopped her for speeding on Woodward, and one thing led
to another and now they were dating. They hadn’t spoken all day because her ex
never picked up their kids as he promised he would so she was busy with the two
girls. But now they were asleep and she could talk freely.
“C’mon, baby,” he said.
“There’s lots more where that came from.”
He went on with her for
another ten minutes until the Dispatcher’s voice broke in.
“10-56, 7-Eleven at Nine
Mile and Pinecrest. Meet the clerk.”
Whalen sighed. 10-56,
intoxicated person. The 7-Eleven was four blocks west of where he was parked.
Probably the guy he just saw walking down the street. No big deal, but still.
Reluctantly he said goodbye
to his sweetheart and told the police radio, “Unit 1267 responding.”
He swung the cruiser onto
Nine Mile toward the convenience store.
❖
“Did you see him?” Nadine
Kotter asked.
“Who?”
“Guy I called about. He
just took off.”
No one was inside or
outside the store. Whalen walked around the side of the building and checked
behind the dumpster. Nobody there.
Out front again, he said,
“I don’t see anybody, Nadine. What’s going on?”
Standing in the doorway,
she sucked the last of her cigarette and backhanded it onto the blacktop. She
was a tough-looking woman with spiked hair bleached white and tattoos of roses
twined among her knuckles on both hands. Whalen liked to stop in to say hello
and share a smoke on quiet nights.
“Guy comes into the store
and starts mumbling some shit about the bakery.” Her words came out in staccato
bursts of smoke. “I go, ‘Dude, what are you talking about,’ and he’s all, ‘The
bakery, the bakery.’”
“Sunday night,” Whalen
said. “Always brings out the wackjobs, Nadine.”
“I know, and this guy
seemed pretty jumpy. But then he goes, ‘Police.’ Then he’s back outside sitting
in the corner, and in another minute he’s up again and walking away.”
“Which direction?”
“Up Pinecrest.” She pointed
around the corner of the store.
“Thing was,” she said, “his
head. It was a bloody mess.”
Whalen stared at her.
“I’m serious. Like he took
a shampoo in it or something.”
“We’re talking about a
stocky black male, dark sweatshirt and levis? Walking kind of like he’s in a
daze?”
“So you did see him.”
“Further up the street I
did, yeah. There was blood on his head?”
“Uh, hello?” Nadine gave a
loose wheezy laugh, like a bag of gravel shifting in her chest. “The whole
right side of his face was covered with it.”
The right side . . . the
side away from Whalen.
“I thought he might have
fallen, maybe hurt himself. Anyway he didn’t seem right so I called it in.”
“Where was he sitting?”
“Over there.” She pointed
toward the metal rack that held propane tanks at the far side of the store.
In the white glare from the
overhead lights Whalen saw spots on the ground beside the rack. He swept his
flashlight beam over the area. Definitely blood.
A second blue-and-white
rolled up and another patrol officer stepped out adjusting the gear on her
belt. Gail Crimmonds was a substantial woman with dark hair pinned back and
skeptical eyes. Whalen filled her in quickly and asked her to take Nadine’s
statement.
He jumped into his scout
car and wheeled it around the lot and out to Pinecrest.
Thinking: Bakery, blood,
police—this is not good.
He eased the car north,
scanning the empty sidewalks and pausing at each corner to shine his spotlight
down the side streets. When he reached Blair Park, he figured the guy could be
anywhere inside the dark grounds so he made a Y-turn back toward Nine. He
called Dispatch and asked for assistance to search the neighborhood.
At the traffic light on
Nine he took a left and drove east, picking up speed as his unease grew. The
only bakery left in Ferndale was the Cake Walk, near the southeast corner of
Nine and Planavon. There used to be two but the other one went bust the summer
before. Most Ferndale businesses weathered the financial crash but a few, like
the other bakery, couldn’t hold on and now there were empty stores like missing
teeth around the downtown.
He skidded to a stop in
front of the Cake Walk facing the wrong way on Nine. The street was deserted
and dark except for the lights at Rosie’s down toward Woodward.
The front selling area of
the store was empty, with bare display counters and shelves. The front door was
locked.
He saw a light glowing in
the rear so he trotted around to the back of the building. The bakery was the
third business off the side street, beside two restaurants closed for the
night.
He pulled at the handle of
the steel rear entrance to the Cake Walk and the door opened.
He drew his duty weapon and
stepped inside. A short corridor from the door to the back room ended at a
partition that blocked his view.
He heard no sounds except
the pounding of blood in his head and the knocking of his heart.
He stood for a moment,
quieting his breathing, getting himself ready for what he might find, and
looked into the workroom.
Lit by overhead
fluorescents, the scene took his breath away.
He struggled to stay
upright against the partition. He stood like that until the room stopped
spinning.
Then he pulled himself
together to call it in.
It was 9:32 on the evening
of April 12, 2009.
Easter Sunday.
About the Author
An award-winning fiction writer and poet, Donald Levin is
the author of The Baker’s Men, the second book in the Martin Preuss
mystery series; Crimes of Love, the first Martin Preuss
mystery; The House of Grins, a mainstream novel; and two books of
poetry, In Praise of Old Photographs and New Year’s
Tangerine. Widely published as a poet and with twenty-five years’
experience as a professional writer, he is dean of the faculty and professor of
English at Marygrove College in Detroit. He lives in Ferndale, Michigan, the
setting for his Martin Preuss mysteries.
Thank you Donald for a great book and guest post. Thank you Pump Up Your Books for allowing me to participate in this blog tour.
The Importance of Being Toby
by Donald Levin
One of the central continuing characters in my Martin Preuss mystery
series is Preuss’s son Toby. When readers meet Toby in the first book, Crimes
of Love, they are introduced to a 16-year-old young man with profound
multiple handicaps who lives in a group home near his father. After his wife
died in a tragic car accident six years before the novel opens, Preuss tried
keeping Toby at home but found himself unable to care for the boy. So he
reluctantly found a residential setting for his son where the workers were
attentive and caring.
Though they live apart, Preuss loves his son deeply and unconditionally.
He spends as much time with Toby as he can, visiting every day, staying for
hours talking and reading to the child, and taking the boy on outings as often
as possible.
Many reviewers of both Crimes of Love and the newest
entry in the series, The Baker’s Men, focus on the relationship
between Preuss and Toby as one of the aspects of the novels that most
distinguish it from other books in the genre. They are struck by the depth of
these two characters’ feelings for each other, especially the way, as one
reviewer noted, Toby is Preuss’s “whole life.”
When people talk to me about the series, they often ask what motivated
me to use someone like Toby as a main character. After all, he’s not the kind
of character we expect to find in a fast-paced police procedural series. Toby
has cerebral palsy and mental retardation, is visually impaired, can’t speak,
and needs help with all his daily living activities. And yet he is the
happiest, most life-affirming character in the books.
I created him for several reasons.
First, while he exists as a fully-formed character in the book, he
is a loving and I hope precisely drawn portrait of my own grandson Jamie, from
how he looks and acts to how he sounds. Jamie died three years ago after having
been in a coma for a full year. I wrote Crimes of Love before
Jamie died but I had always planned to build into the book some of the amazing
lessons I learned from him in his twenty-five years. And now the books serve as
a way for me and my family to remember that extraordinary young man. All this
isn’t necessary to understand Toby, but it helps to enlarge your understanding
of where the character comes from.
But that’s not the only purpose he serves.
Toby is also very much the beating heart of the book. He keeps his
lonely, isolated father connected and grounded, and constantly reminds Preuss
(and the reader) what’s really important in the world that Preuss moves through
as a police detective . . . a world that sometimes seems to consist only of
crimes and violence.
And finally, Toby plays a key thematic role. The Baker’s Men,
like Crimes of Love, is about the failure of love, and what happens
when a family is devoid of love or else relies on false values to replace the
nurturing familial love that everyone needs. The love Toby and his father share
is a bright light shining through the dark worlds of the novels. It’s an
antidote to all the toxic relationships that populate my books.
As the series unfolds, my plan is for Toby to take an increasingly
important role in helping his father not only to solve the crimes Preuss
encounters, but also to negotiate his way through his life as the boy helps him
gradually become less reclusive and open to the possibilities of life that Toby
for all his limitations sees and embraces joyfully.
I hope you’ll get the chance to know and appreciate Toby as I have. And
I hope he brings as much delight into your lives as he has to his father’s—and
to my own.
Connect with Donald:
Author Website: http://donaldlevin.wordpress.com
Author Blog: http://donaldlevin.wordpress.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/donald_levin
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4074490.Donald_Levin
Purchase
The Book:
Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bakers-men-donald-levin/1119403618?ean=9780615968568&itm=1&usri=the+baker%27s+men+donald+levin
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your valued comments