The Enigmatologist - Ben Adams

    2016; 390 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Intrigue, Humorous Science Fiction, Elvis, Romance.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    There’s been another Elvis sighting!  A sweet little old lady down on Las Vegas, New Mexico spotted him.  She even snapped a picture of him, although just like all the photos of flying saucers and the Loch Ness monster, it’s somewhat blurry.

    The National Enquirer has asked John Abernathy, presently living and working in Denver, Colorado, to go down there and check it out.  Everyone knows it’s probably a hoax, but hey, that’s never stopped the National Enquirer before from running an Elvis-sighting story.

    John doesn’t work for them; he earns a subsistence wage as a Private Investigator, meaning he mostly hides in bushes, snapping pictures of cheating husbands doing kinky things with women who aren’t their wives.  On the side he works on becoming an enigmatologist, which is a fancy word for someone who creates crossword puzzles.

    Naturally, John realizes The National Enquirer has their own stable of investigative reporters who could handle the story.  So it’s rather odd that a national publication is asking him to go there instead.

    I wonder if they should tell him that the body of their reporter who they assigned to this story has been found in the New Mexico desert.

What’s To Like...

    The two main story threads are as given above, and our protagonist, John Abernathy spends most of his time evaluating the Elvis photo, while not ignoring the issue of a fellow reporter losing his life in the line of duty.  Several more storylines spring from these two threads, but we’ll refrain from listing them due to spoiler concerns.

    The settings are limited: John journeys from his home in Denver to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and later on travels to a trailer park in who-knows-where.  That’s about it.  There aren’t a lot of characters to keep track of, but I found that each had his/her own personality, and they were fun to meet.  It was refreshing to see a small-town sheriff portrayed as something other than a bigot and/or an idiot.

    The story moves along at a pleasantly brisk pace; I don’t recall any slow spots.  The humor is of the "just right" quantity, and it doesn’t overshadow the quite unique storyline that Ben Adams creates.  I liked the music references: Elvis (of course), Bing Crosby, .38 Special, Foreigner, Judas Priest, etc.  Ben Adams is obviously a classic rock enthusiast.  There’s a bit of romance in the tale, but it isn’t enough to scare away male readers.

    I liked the ending; it seemed plausible, fit well, and didn't have a "rushed" feel.  Both storylines are fully resolved, and come with a couple of plot twists that kept things interesting.  A couple of the subsidiary plot threads remain open, including the romance angle and the fate of John’s father.  But I presume these are addressed in the next book in the series.

    The chapters are short-to-moderate, 32 of them covering 390 pages.  The Enigmatologist is a standalone story, as well as (apparently) the start of a series.

Excerpts...

    “They got this girl there, man,” Leadbelly said, eyes empty with daydreams, “you know how strippers are all named after cities?”

    “The kid follows you,” John continued, “asks you some questions, like the kid from the bar.”

    “Her name’s Old Detroit.  She’s gotta be like seventy, man.”

    “It gets a little heated.  He makes some accusations.”

    “She brings you lunch butt naked and you pay her to put her clothes on.  It’s outta sight.”  (loc. 1532)

    “So, does this mean we’re boyfriend girlfriend?” he asked, looking into her deep brown eyes.

    “That depends,” Rosa said, “how do you feel about dating an older woman?”

    “How much older are we talking?  Not four hundred?”

    “How old do you think I look?”

    “Not a day over perfect.”

    “You’re so cheesy,” she said.  “I’m one hundred and sixty three, if you must know.”

    “So you’re a cougar?”  (loc. 5684)

Kindle Details...

    The Enigmatologist sells for $0.99 at Amazon, which IMO, is a heckuva deal.  Its sequel, The Resurrectionist, is also $0.99, so it won't break your budget to check into this series  ANAICT, these are the only two e-books Ben Adams offers right now.

  

“I think the world might be better off with one less painting of naked Elvis.”  (loc. 5460)

    The quibbles are minor.  In ascending order of importance:

    I spent the first half of the book wondering where the story was heading, but that’s a compliment, not a complaint.  Somewhere around the middle there was a significant genre-shift genre which some Amazon reviewers apparently didn’t like, but I thought it worked rather well. 

    OTOH, I could’ve done without the cussing that runs throughout the book.  Cusswords don’t offend me, and in a lot of cases, they help set the tone of, say, a gritty detective story, or an action-thriller.  But for me, the overall tone of The Enigmatologist is warmhearted, and the frequent cussing runs contrary to that.  I worry that some readers who would otherwise enjoy this book will be turned off by the plethora of four-letter words.

    My final and foremost quibble with the book is the editing.  There were just a few too many of these (for example: “soldier”, not “solider”) to ignore.  I recognize indie authors have to manage their literary budgets carefully, but hey, catching errors is one of the things that (unpaid) beta-readers should be doing.

    But enough of the negatives.  For me, The Enigmatologist was a delight to read, with an imaginative storyline, a lively pace, and a charmingly nerdy protagonist.  Best of all, there’s already a sequel, The Resurrectionist, and it’s sitting on my Kindle, waiting patiently to be read.  Here’s hoping that Ben Adams has plans for writing even more tales in the series.

    8½ Stars.  Subtract ½ star (each) if you’re not an fan of Elvis, or if you think that solving crossword puzzles are a complete waste of time.