Cold Steel Rain by Kenneth Abel: I’d never heard of this author, and had his book been more than two dollars in the Safeway bread aisle I probably would have passed it by. That said, my only major gripe with the book was that I often felt a strong desire to throw conjunctions at the author, who tended to replace such necessary words with commas.

The plot is complicated, so I won’t try to explain it. Suffice it to say that the main character, Danny Chaisson, is running from both his past and present, trying to find out why people want him dead. The novel is rather obviously anti-gun, but the story never comes off as preachy. The Black dialect, from an admittedly white perspective, was spot on without making the characters sound stupid, which tends to be a problem when writing in any dialect. Everyone had believable (if sometimes despicable) motives, and at the end you were left with a feeling of satisfaction and some small measure of hope for the future…without denying the grim reality of the present.

Originally posted on Bookcrossing.