The World of Logan Terret
"Terret cleverly riffs on hardboiled fiction tropes, piling on red herrings and suspects to deliriously entertaining effect… noir fans will hope for a sequel." —Publishers Weekly
"An engaging mix of humor, mystery, history, and geologic curiosities." — Kirkus Reviews
“Liked it! I suspect most readers will be stunned and amazed at Nick's ability to find geological analogies to life.”
—A retired geology professor, eminent earthquake expert, past officer of the Geological Society of America, corporate CEO, and author of numerous scholarly papers.
From Simon & Schuster, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2025 by Mike Steere
While titular stones are only semi-precious, this is gem grade. Rare and wondrously strange. A page-turner, too, in sardonic first person with wise cracks and noir word fossils like "yegg" and "jamoke" that were old when Humphrey Bogart was still alive and snarling. The tale itself is real-time present, as told by consulting geologist Nick Cameron, who has a sideline in solving murders and almost getting killed.
Before page 15, he/we have been reeled in by a dame (his word) with a hidden fortune in Lake Superior agates and immediate murders of two leading lapidaries. This happens in snowbird RV and rockhound caravanserai Quartzrock, Arizona (Quartzsite, AZ in real life) and puts Cameron on the trail of a deadly dangerous killer, aka White Buns, beginning with a roadie way up to the shores of Lake Superior.
Leads pull Cameron from the North Woods back to the desert and beyond, with guidance from all-knowing best pal, sleuthing mentor, and guru Frankie, a Navajo/Italian who creates high art in silver and stone, communes with his ancestral land, and cooks squisita carbonara.
Compounding mysteries take Cameron back South, with plot turns more quantum-entangled that merely twisty. Later comes a dive, both geological and historic, into Mexico. There's rock science arcana, asides, and explainers of details -- like, say, a hexadecimal Unicode ver of marks old-time hoboes left for each other. Bizarre, for sure, but pertinent to the investigation.
Cameron almost gets bumped off, while almost hooking up with a parade of sultry dames he's sure are wild about him. The rock shamus ogling in geological terms is an obvious running joke. And he's the butt of it, as is old-school macho in general. I mean, come on -- "hotter than a Soviet drill bit at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole." Can anybody take this stuff seriously?
Love the brill retro pulp book-ish cover by artist Michael Patrick Bailey, who also did inside drawings. My own favorites being the diagram of an actual device for desert gold separation (no water, no panning) and dreamy rendering of a Mexican Revolutionista with machine-gun, back in the time of Pancho Villa. That one's beautiful, as are sundry riffs in writing.
Having lived in AZ and read all sorts of paeans to the Southwest, I proclaim Terret's to be among the truest, dead-on gorgeously apt words about Sonoran Desert. Funny, too. From a prose ode to creosote bushes: "Scraggly, bad-hair shrubs. The botanical version of a coyote."
Read and have a riot, as Logan Terret surely did writing it.
