Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

review

“An Academy of Murder” by Luke Davis

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Detective Cameron Ballack is not only back; he’s on a roll. Two mysteries so far this year!

The wheelchair-bound detective is the creation of writer Luke Davis. He’s works with the Greater St. Louis Special Investigative Division. The unit functions as a special task force focused on murder and occasionally general mayhem. 

In The Burning Glow, published in June, he helped track down a car bomber. In his recent adventure, An Academy of Murder, Ballack finds himself on farm more familiar ground. A janitor has been found dead at King’s Prep, a private Christian school. It almost looks like suicide, but the forensic investigation shows it was murder.

The setting is personal because Cameron’s father, Martin, had taught there until he left for elsewhere. And much of the reason had to do with Cameron. The school’s administration had been unwilling to accommodate a special needs child.

The reader knows before Cameron and his team do that the janitor had come across evidence of a cheating scandal involving the chemistry class. Then the chemistry teacher is brutally attacked. Another murder follows. The school administration is something less than welcoming, and the tension with the investigators doesn’t help the investigation.

Luke Davis

Cameron will do more than track down a killer. He will also uncover part of his own personal story, a part he never knew. 

Davis teaches at Westminster Christian Academy in St. Louis and chairs the Bible Department there. He’s also taught at schools in Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia. He describes himself as “Presbyterian body, Lutheran heart, Anglican blood, Orthodox spirit,” all of which have served him well in writing the Cameron Ballack mysteries. He has published five Ballack mysteries, Litany of Secrets (2013), The Broken Cross (2015), A Shattered Peace (2017), and A Burning Glow (2026); and now An Academy of Murder; and Joel: The Merivalkan Chronicles Book 1 (2017). He blogs at For Grace and Kingdom.

An Academy of Murder is a terrific read. If you’re from St. Louis, there’s the added fun of seeing the places the police team visit, the roads and highways they travel, and the numerous references to the institutions of the city (including a few restaurants). It’s a fine mystery, full of twists and turns navigated by an exceptionally intelligent police mind.

Related: 

My review of Tides of Death by Luke H. Davis.

My review of Island Games by Luke H. Davis. 

Redemption: The Church in Ancient Times by Luke H. Davis.

Reign: The Church in the Middle Ages by Luke H. Davis.

Reform: The Church at the Birth of Protestantism by Luke H. Davis.

Renewal: The Church That Expands Outward by Luke H. Davis.


Reading a Novel that Stars Your Hometown.

My review of Litany of Secrets.

My review of The Broken Cross.

My review of A Shattered Peace.

My review of The Burning Glow.

My review of Tough Issues, True Hope by Luke Davis.

“Ushers” by Joe Hill

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Martin Lorensen is a young man who’s been extremely lucky, or he’s extremely guilty. Twice he’s narrowly escaped death – a train wreck and a school shooting. Both times, his escape was a last-minute thing – a panic attack kept him from boarding the train and an upset stomach stopped him from entering school and returning home. In the train wreck case, he warned a mother and daughter not to board.

The FBI is interested. Very interested. To the two agents interviewing Martin, it seems like there’s a strong possibility that Martin knows what’s going to happen before it does. And perhaps he’s not the lucky bystander. Perhaps he’s the cause.

Joe Hill

Ushers is a short story by best-selling writer Joe Hill, and it’s one creepy story. You’re sucked into what may or may not be a tale of a serial killer. The story is structured in two parts – an “informal” interview of Lorensen by the agents and then a meeting in a bar between the suspect and one of the agents, where all is made clear.

Hill is the author of The Fireman, Heart-Shaped Box, and Strange Weather, among many others. Several of his stories have been adapted for movies; his Locke & Key stories became a popular series on Netflix. He’s also written several graphic novels, and he has a not terribly active blog at Hill’s House (the title possibly being a nod to Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House).

Ushers begins as a police procedural type of story and ends as something entirely different. And Hill nicely builds the tension right to the breaking point.

New Review of “Poetry at Work”

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Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

U.K. poet James Sale has posted a review of Poetry at Work at Amazon UK. Here’s what he had to say.

“There are at least two reasons why this is an important book on poetry, as relevant now as when it was published some 6 years ago. First, Glynn Young realises that over the last 30 years poetry has been hijacked by academics; it’s no longer a poetry by the people for the people. Rather, every second poet you hear about nowadays is Professor X or Dr Y doing research on language somewhere you have never heard of. This is pernicious as it has created a cartel of influence in which the ‘experts’ congratulate each others’ books, but in reality very few people are reading them. Why would they? I cannot think of any academic poet of the last 30 years who has written one poem that stands comparison with Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.’

“The thing about poetry is that it is not written by ‘experts’ – its origin is very different. Which leads on to the second reason why Young’s book is so important. If poetry is highly unlikely to be found in academia, where is it to be found? The answer of course is that it will be found in real life, and more specifically, as Young shows, at work. What Young does is re-examine how poetry is everywhere around us, and that it is the poet’s at work who have so much to contribute. That said, as Young observes, ‘Poets, if they remain creative, can find themselves as road kill on the organisational highway.’ It would be good to see these ideas developed further and not allowed to remain fallow; poetry deserves to be widely disseminated and read, and this will never happen so long as the ‘academics’ have it ‘in thrall’. Read this book – it’s worth it.”