On the Coffee Table: Steve Brewer

I just finished End Run: A Drew Gavin Mystery by Steve Brewer. Mystery is not usually my genre but I really enjoyed this one. It definitely kept me guessing, too. I thought I had it figured out but was wrong. I realized the truth at the same point that the protagonist, Drew Gavin, did.


Image via PaperBack Swap

I picked this book up, along with Olympian by Peter L. Dixon, from a free book exchange shelf at the Tree Farm this past summer. While Olympian was underwhelming, End Run was good fun. Character development, in particular, was much stronger with this one. You don't learn too much, even about Drew, at once and you get glimpses of little quirks here and there: his love for '50s rock'n'roll, his disdain for baseball and so on. I really grew to care about the characters and how the story ended for each of them became important to me.

Gavin is a sportswriter by trade who inadvertently gets caught up in a murder case. He is himself a former college football player and the story centers around a plan to bring an NBA franchise to Albuquerque. The dangers of sports gambling are also integral to the narrative.

I was a big mystery fan as a kid. I liked Encyclopedia Brown a lot, but my favorite series was The Three Investigators. The genre hasn't held as much interest for me as an adult. I've dabbled: a little Agatha Christie here, a bit of Nero Wolfe there. But End Run has me thinking that perhaps I should read more. My Wife is a big mystery fan so we have plenty of them around the house. Sigh... Too many books, too little time.