Book Review: "Try Dying" by James Scott Bell

I'm giving away a brand new copy of today's book! Leave a comment with your email address so I can contact you if you win. I'll pick a name and announce the winner on Wednesday, November 21. Good luck!

This week, the
Christian Fiction Blog Alliance
is introducing

TRY DYING
(Center Street October 24, 2007)
by
James Scott Bell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Scott Bell is a former trial lawyer who now writes full time. He is also the fiction columnist for Writers Digest magazine and adjunct professor of writing at Pepperdine University.

His book on writing, Plot and Structure is one of the most popular writing books available today. The national bestselling author of several novels of suspense, he grew up and still lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on his next Buchanan thriller.


ABOUT THE BOOK:On a wet Tuesday morning in December, Ernesto Bonilla, twenty-eight, shot his twenty-three-year-old wife, Alejandra, in the backyard of their West 45th Street home in South Los Angeles. As Alejandra lay bleeding to death, Ernesto drove their Ford Explorer to the westbound Century Freeway connector where it crossed over the Harbor Freeway and pulled to a stop on the shoulder.

Bonilla stepped around the back of the SUV, ignoring the rain and the afternoon drivers on their way to LAX and the west side, placed the barrel of his .38 caliber pistol into his mouth, and fired.

His body fell over the shoulder and plunged one hundred feet, hitting the roof of a Toyota Camry heading northbound on the harbor Freeway. The impact crushed the roof of the Camry. The driver, Jacqueline Dwyer, twenty-seven, an elementary schoolteacher from Reseda, died at the scene.

This would have been simply another dark and strange coincidence, the sort of thing that shows up for a two-minute report on the local news--with live remote from the scene--and maybe gets a follow-up the next day. Eventually the story would go away, fading from the city's collective memory.

But this story did not go away. Not for me. Because Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman I was going to marry.

In Try Dying, this fast-paced thriller, lawyer Ty Buchanan must enter a world of evil to uncover the cause of his fiancee's death--even if hie has to kill for the truth.

"Bell is one of the best writers out there...he creates characters readers care about...a story worth telling."
~Library Review~

Book Noir at It's Best

Gritty. That was my first thought when I finished reading this book. The other was, wow this could totally be made into a movie. It reminded me very much of the movie Collateral starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. The way the setting was described along with the action sequences and just the mood in general made me feel like I was in a slow moving but suspenseful film noir. There's a lot of mystery and suspense in this book that keeps you guessing til the end. Things that appear to be unconnected somehow have a thread that ties everything together. I love all the characters in this novel especially the non traditional priest and the basketball playing nun. Really can't wait to read more about them.

This is a book you could pass on to anybody who is a fan of the genre and they would not be disappointed. I would compare this book to be on par with John Grisham just without sex or cursing. Like I've said before it has been proven that you can write an excellent story without having to resort to filler material. There were several places in the story where I could see another author just throwing in a sex scene or placing a few f-bombs to add space. But the story does not need it at all. Instead what you get is action filled drama, several intense scenes of violence and a story that keeps you reading from page one. This book shows that Christian fiction is not just clean romance novels. I'm really looking forward to the next book in the series. Top notch writing, Mr. Bell, top notch.

Try Dying by James Scott Bell is published by Center Street (2007)