William G. TapplyRecensioni

Good read to help you understand what goes into making a mystery novel. Although I think the writing advice would apply to almost any genre.

This is the first book by Tapply I have read and I am glad to have discovered this author through the goodreads reviews of author / reviewer James Thane.
Brady Coyne is an excellent character that has survived for a long time in the world of fiction. He seems to be a gentleman with a solid conscience and a quick wit. The plot of Follow the Sharks is interesting, with an intriguing story and some well made characters in addition to Brady. It moves at an optimum pace, and the descriptions of places, people and the action are very enjoyable.
This one is a fine book to spend a lazy weekend with, and I did just that.

Rare stamps, lawyers, collectors, and experts. I thought I might have wandering into a Lawrence Block novel. Block, as we know, is a philatelist as is Keller, one of his characters. Tapply must be, too. I've always liked Tapply's books. They are often intricately plotted and populated with interesting characters. Eventually, I'll read all of them.

Good mystery. I didn't read the prior books, but that didn't seem to hurt at all. The twist with the real murder surprised me and really worked.

I liked that Brady read Moby Dick to put himself to sleep. I agree with his feelings about the chapter on whales' tails.

I would like to read the earlier books in the series.

Baseball. Kidnapping a child. Murder.

Eddie Donagan had been a promising major league pitcher until suddenly, he could no longer throw the ball. His life fell apart.
Several years previously, attorney Brady Coyne received a call from a wealthy client. He had spotted Donagan, then playing baseball in college, and marked him as someone with a great future in the game. He wanted to sign him but realized that Donagan needed an agent who would watch out for his interests. He decided that Coyne was the right person for the job. Though it wasn’t his specialty, Coyne took the job. Sure enough, Donagan was signed by the Boston Red Sox, began a successful career, and married his client’s daughter.
A few years later, the career and marriage ended and Coyne lost contact with Donagan. That was until he got a panicky phone call from Donagan’s ex-wife and her father telling him that Donagan’s ten-year-old son E.J. hadn’t come home after finishing his morning paper route.
When Donagan got to E.J.’s house, he discovered that the police weren’t concerned with his disappearance. They said that at that age, a lot of boys take off for a short time for various reasons and then return one their own. In real life, the case would be handled properly by the police, especially since it involves a prominent, wealthy citizen and a ten-year-old boy, but that would not make for an interesting novel, so against his better judgment, Coyne was soon mixed up in a very confusing and dangerous case.
The story continued with a $150,000 ransom demand with very strict, convoluted demands for delivering the money. After the ransom was paid, however, E.J. still did not return home. And then Eddie disappeared and Coyne began to receive some very cryptic clues from the kidnapper. Questions arose as to whether the kidnapping was connected to Eddie, either directly or because of something that might have happened when he was still playing professional baseball.
William G. Tapply’s descriptive writing put the reader into the story. There is an amazing description of what it feels like to be drowning that left me gasping for breath..
He also presented a lot of interesting information and background on baseball. He stated
“Baseball is a game of absolutely flat planes, perfect right angles, precise distances, measured velocities, and beautiful parabolas. Euclid would have loved baseball....Baseball demonstrates repeatedly all the physical laws of motion.” I had never looked at it that way. I will always be seeing that in the future.

Enjoyed the first book in this series, but this one's not my cup of tea. After realizing this, I skipped the middle 85% of the book and jumped to the end to see how it all came out.

A friend of mine recommended this when I announced that I was in the mood for some good mysteries. This isn't an author I would typically pick out for myself, but I love to expand my reading horizons. I was surprised that I enjoyed this. I wasn't in love with it, but still enjoyable.

Federal Judge Thomas Larrigan is being vetted to be the next Supreme Court Justice. While ostensibly having no skeletons in the closet, in reality he has several and he enlists the help of some ex-Marine buddies to take care of those skeletons.

One of those skeletons was his underage mistress, An Li, in Vietnam who had a child that Thomas took from her and had put up for adoption. An Li, having escaped Vietnam at the end of the war to Paris, had become a well-known actress but is now suffering from a fatal degenerative disease and she happens to see a photograph of a woman she is sure is her daughter, May, now having adopted the name Jessie Church. She tried to contact Jesse who now is an ex-cop working as a P.I. and hiding from a mobster she had testified against so now she’s on the run again and drifting toward her biological mother in N.Y.

I have read a lot of Tapply and mourn his demise. This book is a stand-alone, not part of his regular series, and is a good story. Not great, but it has an intricate plot with well-defined characters. I would have to agree with some reviewers that the book doesn’t hang together as well as some of his Brady Coyne novels. The ending, in particular, seemed a bit haphazard. It was published after his death so I suspect it may have been completed by someone else. Humorous when you think of the ghostwriter character in the book.

A larger moral question is whether we should continue to condemn people for acts committed while young and in the midst of war. As we know all too well, war places enormous stresses on participants. Larrigan assumes he will be condemned and I guess his overriding desire to join the Supreme Court colors his judgment, but by all other appearances he has been a model person since Vietnam. I suppose you could argue that his morality is more than flawed by his initiation of the acts that result in several deaths, but had he simply revealed his actions during the war with a mea culpa shouldn’t his actions have been forgiven? Does no one believe in individual reformation anymore? Or are we to be eternally subject to retribution?

Good mystery. The victim doesn't garner much sympathy, but the characters were interesting, the story was compelling, and while I guess whodunnit, it wasn't until after the halfway mark, not bad!

Good mystery. The victim doesn't garner much sympathy, but the characters were interesting, the story was compelling, and while I guess whodunnit, it wasn't until after the halfway mark, not bad!

Brady Coyne mystery good.

Running for governor on the Republican ticket, Tom Baron needs his image to be squeaky clean. He employs men like Brady Coyne, a compassionate Boston attorney, to keep problems far away from his campaign. But when his son doesn’t come home one night, Tom’s political strategy becomes a criminal matter.

His son’s girlfriend has been murdered, and the boy has no alibi. To protect his friend’s political ambitions, Brady digs into the investigation, finding a trail of drugs and corruption that stretches far across the Eastern seaboard.

good mystery @ killing of Private Eye + friend Brady - a lawyer - Boston scene

Les Katz may well be scum. A private detective, he does not hesitate to take the case when a Farrah Fawcett look-alike hires him to tail her husband. The photos he secures suggest the man is cheating on his wife, but they aren’t definitive. Rather than disappoint his client, he contacts her man and offers to sell him the pictures. Katz considers this a charitable act, but to his attorney, Brady Coyne, it looks an awful lot like blackmail.

Brady tells Katz to give the money back, fully expecting to be ignored. But when Katz is killed in a hit-and-run, he realizes blackmail wasn’t the PI’s only mistake: Les Katz was murdered to protect a terrible secret—and a conspiracy that goes far beyond a single cheating husband.

Mr Tapply's break from his usual series produced a very readable book about the intrigue and violence that evolves from a Supreme Court candidate covering his sins of the past.. Interesting characters, good and bad, and a feasible, if violent , plot move the story at a brisk pace to a satisfactory conclusion. It could have served the author well as a practice exercise for his university classes. A stylish and competent finish for a proficient and successful author.½

I’ve read many of Tapply’s books and regret his passing. I’ll continue until I’ve read all of them. This happens to be one of the early ones I had missed. (They needn’t be read in order.)

Tom Baron has a problem. He's running for governor when his son's girlfriend is found dead with cocaine in her body and his son has disappeared, obviously a person of interest for the cops. So he calls his lawyer, Brady Coyne, who very reluctantly agrees to help look for the son. Never one to bend the rules Brady happens on a trail that may very well test his friendship with Tom and throw the gubernatorial race into turmoil. Reluctant to participate in what’s normally better done by the police, Brady is dragged into researching some things he’d rather not know about.

I only wish there had been more legal shenanigans.

The more exciting moments are leavened by Tapply’s prosaic view of the law: ;“I spent the next hour or so on the phone, doing the things that make the legal profession exciting. I set up two luncheon meetings with attorneys for the next week, I declined an invitation to serve on an ad hoc committee for the Bar Association. I checked back with the Coast Guard, which had not found Frank Paradise’s boat. I reconfirmed my golf date with Charlie McDevitt. I called a travel agent about a junket to the Madison River in Montana. I touched base with a few clients. A thrill a minute. Real Perry Mason stuff.

This book feels like an experiment that didn't quite work. The plot seems forced and the dialogue not up to the standards of the authors when working individually. I like both Tapply and Craig when working alone, but here not. Each character starts with a case which then (surprise, surprise) merge together. I mean really. Another element that really pissed me off was the totally unnecessary "reading" by a fortune teller that just happens to provide the clue needed to prevent catastrophe. I mean really. Supernatural elements strike me as just an author being lazy because he/she can't figure out a rational explanation. It's not that I need a complete explanation of events, but why certain people were where they were and why and who was working for whom and why just didn't add up.

William Tapply is the author of the wonderful Brady Coyne series of legal mysteries. Before his unfortunate early death he also produced a series about Stoney Calhoun who lives in the Maine woods, loves Kate, a woman who’s husband is slowly dying of MS, ties flies, is a popular fishing guide, and who is regularly visited by the “Man in the Suit,” who wants to know if Stoney has begun to regain his memory.

Stoney Calhoun was struck by lightning and lost his memory. He doesn’t know what he had been, but he has the skills of a cop. While taking a professor on a fishing trip, they stop at Quarantine Island where the tourist discovers a charred body. The professor is later killed on Stoney’s deck and Sheriff Dickman, against Stoney’s better judgment, wants to enlist his aid in finding the killer.

Gray Ghost, by the way, is a type of fishing fly (I know nothing about such things) and also nebulous ghosts that haunt Stoney as he discovers he has skills (like sophisticated basketball moves and martial arts abilities) for which he has no recollection.

A very enjoyable series, good character development and a very likable protagonist.

"Ten thousand volts of electricity had wiped out Stoney Calhoun's memories of his entire previous life, which, he figured, was a mixed blessing, at least. As well as he could tell, though, getting zapped by lightning hadn't affected his talents and abilities. The last seven years-his new life, and the only one he knew-had turned out to be a great adventure in self-discovery.”

That’s the premise behind this very charming series of mystery stories. Stoney is visited periodically by the Man in the Suit, who knows everything about Stoney’s past and who eagerly awaits the return of Stoney’s memory. Needing his help, an unidentified “agency,” blackmails Stoney into helping. “The Man in the Suit shrugged. ‘I could've asked,’ he said, ‘and you, of course, would've told me to go to hell, and if I then proceeded to threaten you, you'd 've just laughed at me, and so then I'd 've had to show you that we were serious about needing your help, so time being of the essence here, we figured we'd streamline the process and show you we were serious before asking you. . . .I’ve kept an eye on you. As you know. We don't miss much, Stoney. You've solved two murders since you've been up here in Maine. Your sheriff calls on you to help him figure things out. You've shown intelligence, initiative, and resourcefulness-and courage to burn-not even to mention all of the survival and self-defense and problem-solving skills that were instilled in you at great government expense.’ "

So Stoney is forced undercover by the “agency” as a fishing guide to a remote high class fishing lodge in northern Maine to investigate the killing of another agent, McNulty, who had been at the lodge but was discovered dead in a car with an underage girl, both having been shot, yet he and the girl already dead from botulism poisoning, the shooting being merely to make it look like murder/suicide. Soon after his arrival at the lodge, one of the other guides is murdered with Stoney’s gun and things start to get interesting as Stoney realizes he has many skills his conscious self cannot remember.

For those who care about such things, the title of each book, is the name of a fly-fishing fly.

Another good Brady Coyne novel. Brady gets a call late one night from Jack Gold, a long-time friend and client who reports that his son and girlfriend have been in a car accident. Jenny, Brian’s girl friend, had been driving and their car left the road on a curve and crashed down a hillside into a frozen river. Jenny’s body has been recovered but there is no sign of Brian. Brady travels up to their house to console and has a conversation with the highly respected local police chief. But things start to go awry (here I have a minor problem with the way Tapply handles the timing, but it had me turning pages back several times to try to figure out an apparent time lapse.) Brady gets a call from Jack, who has split up from his younger wife Sharon, who is unable to reconcile with the apparent death of her son. He has some important information that he wants to show Brady. When he doesn’t show for the appointment, Brady becomes concerned and tracks him down to a seedy motel where no one answers the door. When police are summoned, they discover the body of the police chief.

Anything more would be a spoiler. Solid mystery. Tapply is consistently enjoyable. My favorite character is Horowitz.

Walt Duffy, famous bird photographer who had lost the use of his legs, asks Coyne, his lawyer, to take some valuable letters of Merriwether Lewis to be appraised. The next day, Coyne finds Duffy on the brick floor of his birdhouse, his head bleeding profusely, crutches by his side and Ethan, Duffy’s son who lived with him has gone missing.

The plot becomes thicker as Coyne finds himself manipulated by a killer with links to a secret environmentalist organization. The killer seems to know Coyne’s every move and Coyne is not sure what move to make to save lives.

Sounds thin, but I’m trying to avoid spoilers. All you need to know is that Tapply writes well, always tells an engaging story, sprinkled with humor, and provides a few hours of solid entertainment.

Evie has left Brady for California to take care of her dying father, but she left no firm commitment to return, so Brady is left with his dog and townhouse. He’s visited in the office by Alexandra a former squeeze. (don’t modern characters manage any kind of longevity in their relationships - except perhaps for Steve Carella who doesn’t look so modern anymore. Thank goodness for Carl Houseman.) Alex wants Brady to handle the divorce of her brother a well-known photographer -- a non-embedded one -- whose wife has left him and is now suffering from the loss of his right hand and PTSD.

Gus winds up dead of an apparent suicide after sending an apologetic email to his estranged wife. Alex and Brady suspect foul play and soon Brady finds himself involved with potetnail terrorist actions. More and I would spoil things.

It would appear this is Tapply’s attempt to reconcile the anti-war movements of the sixties with nascent anti-war feelings (not activities since there does not seem to be any formal movement against the Iraq/Afghanistan wars at all) of today. At one point Gus rails against the symbiotic relationship between the military and journalists, each needing the other. Embedded journalists," he said. "They take the pictures they're supposed to take. They don't get to see the caskets, the body bags, the blood and brains splattered against the sides of buildings, the dead American kids half hanging out of blown-up Hummers, the mutilated Iraqi children...The brass. They couldn't control us. Couldn't censor us, couldn't tell us where to go, what to shoot. They knew we were after the stories they didn't want told. The senselessness of it. The failure of it. The friendly fire fatalities. The crappy equipment. The wrongheaded decisions. The dead children. They were all about covering up.”

A few reviewers have complained at the lack of action. Not me. I really like the characters Tapply develops and the two plots in this book are more than satisfactory. He’s a favorite.

My favoriter lawyer is at it again. He and Evie are on a weekend holiday at Cape Cod, a trip Brady made against his better instincts, having a horror for weekend traffic out of Boston. But the cabin is nice and secluded and over a two-pound lobster Brady thinks things mught not go to badly after all. Until, Evie suddenly gets jup from her chair, macrhes over to the bar, and delivers a stinging slap to a man standing there. Turnms out his name is Larry Scott, someone she had dated several years before, who just couldnt seem to let go and continued to stalk her and show up at the most incnvenient times.

Brady and Larry have a confrontation outside the restaurant - which Brady loses. The next morning Evie goes for her early morning run (another reason never to exercise) and Brady is awakened from his sleep to the sounds of screaming. He discovers Evie leaning over the body of a very dead and bloody Larry Scott. And a knife missing from the kitchen of the cabin.

Following an intense interrogation Evie and Brady are released to go home. Evie, thinking that perhaps Brady believes she might have killed Scott, is angry with him. Then she disappears. And more murders occur. And now Brady and Evie are both suspects in all of them.

I love Tapply's stuff and was dismayed to hear of his death in 2009. Fortunately all of his work is being issued as ebooks. This is the first in his Brady Coyne series and sets the stage for the following books in the series. All are worth reading.

Charity's Point is a cliff named after a Puritan accused of being a witch who jumped to her death in the 17th century. Now, George, the son of Florence Gresham has been found washed up at the base of the same cliff. He was very different than his brother, Win, who was described as a real killer by his mother. Win had been killed in Vietnam. Or was he?

Florence is quite a character. Dud, her husband, blew his brains out with a shotgun in the bathroom, preferring that to a slower death from cancer. They had talked about it. Two weeks later, Florence, while taking a bath, castigated the maid for not cleaning the bathroom up well as she had just found a piece of Dud's skull.

She asks Brady, whose law practice is as much about catering to the whims of his rich clients as it is providing legal advice, to research George's suicide. And then to check into Win's death as well. The elite prep school where George taught history has an interesting set of characters including a strong skin-head contingent. And did the football star's plagiarized paper have anything to do with George's death?

This is a fine start to a wonderful series. Coyne is a great character to follow and I an so glad the series is being re-released as many of the originals had gone out-of-print.

One joke I must relay. Brady and his friend Charlie, who works in the Justice Department, are having dinner and Charlie is describing a recent scene in which the Coast Guard ship he was on stopped a boat on which the smugglers began breaking open bales of marijuana and throwing it overboard to the hundreds of circling gulls.

"So we asked one of the guys what the hell he thought he was doing, feeding the gulls like that. Know what he said?”
“What did he say?”
Charlie stared at me. “He said, ‘I wanted to leave no tern unstoned.’”

And another sample: "Charlie and I sat across from each other at one of the long tables covered with a stained, yellowed tablecloth. Next to Charlie sat a fat couple from Arizona, each of whom was hunched over a big sirloin, well-done. The couple’s two kids, a girl and a boy maybe eleven and nine, split a bowl of spaghetti. The boy complained that he hated spaghetti. The father told him to shut up, as he shoveled chunks of thick, overcooked beef into his mouth. The girl asked her mother for a french fry. The mother told her to eat her spaghetti first, then proceeded to gobble down all her french fries so that when the girl was finished there’d be none left."

My thanks to the publisher for this free advance copy through Netgalley in return for my always honest opinion.

The Seventh Enemy is an interesting novel about the theatrical aspects of politics struggling to escape from a lackluster mystery story. The politics are those of gun control, and Brady Coyne is drawn into the debate when his childhood friend Walter Kinnick, scheduled to testify against a gun-control law pending in the Massachusetts legislature, unexpectedly endorses it instead. He and (by association) Brady land on the “enemies list” of an NRA-like organization, and bullets begin flying in their direction.

Local law-enforcement officers, implausibly, do little to investigate, and Brady is soon on the trail of the shooter. Suspects abound, but most of them have such spectacularly obvious motives that experienced mystery readers will instantly discount them, leaving the “least likely suspect” more obvious than Tapply probably intended. Brady’s investigation of the mystery thus feels a bit perfunctory, and the crowning revelation – which doesn’t solve it, so much as render it moot – equally so. The latest installment in Brady’s busy romantic life also has a by-the-numbers quality, though he’s more fun to read about at the beginning of a relationship (as here) than at the end.

What lifts The Seventh Enemy above all that is Tapply’s sharp, cynical portrait of the gun-control debate as an elaborate political dance in which legislators, lobbyists, and reporters all know – and, to their mutual benefit, facilitate – one another’s moves. The great gulf, he suggests, is not that dividing those who support gun control from those who oppose it, but that dividing the “true believers” on both sides from the pros who choreograph the dance and use it to further their own careers in the public eye. Tapply, interestingly, spares neither Walt Kinnick nor Brady from that critique, giving his hero pause to think about his handling of the case and the reader a novel more complex than it might first appear.

This entry in Tapply’s long-running string of novels about Boston attorney Brady Coyne has a lot of promising elements. The plot starts promisingly: A reclusive Vietnam veteran, busted by local cops for growing marijuana with which to blunt the effects of Agent Orange exposure, needs legal help and Brady, who agrees to provide it, uncovers dark secrets and murder. The vet and his girlfriend – a free-spirited artist whom he rescued from drug addiction and prostitution – are well-drawn characters. Brady is his usual amiable self, and long-time supporting characters have their smile-inducing moments. The setting, in rural northern Connecticut, is unfamiliar and beautifully evoked.

The problem is that it doesn’t end there. There’s a subplot involving the vet’s unpublished memoir, a mysterious list of names that Brady investigates, an elaborately described funeral, a romantic subplot, and not one but two scenes in which friends with ties to the federal government tell Brady – fruitlessly, of course – to stop investigating. All that, along with a larger-than-usual supporting cast (three of whom have significant back stories that are relevant to the plot), is a lot to pack into a novel of well under 300 pages, and it shows. Most of the supporting characters (the literary agent, the vet’s war buddies, a hard-nosed local cop, Brady’s current girlfriend) barely exist except as plot devices, Brady’s investigation is perfunctory and the solution comes out of nowhere, and the final showdown with the killer relies on a gray-bearded Hollywood cliché.

The whole enterprise feels like an omelet with too much filling and not enough egg: It lacks shape and proportion, and sprawls across the plate with bits falling out on every side. The fact that some of the bits are undeniably tasty – the funeral is genuinely moving, and Brady’s scenes with the artist-girlfriend work in interestingly complicated ways – doesn’t make the dish, as a whole, anything close to a success.

The reader embarking on a project of reading a mystery set in every state of the union plus our nation's capital can expect two kinds of experiences. On the one hand, the armchair traveller will visit locations she has never seen in person, using the author's descriptions and her own imagination to inhabit Alaska, Hawaii or Delaware for a few hours. On the other hand, reading a book set in a familiar location, the reader compares her own impressions and memories with those of the author -- did he "get it right?" Such was the case as I was reading [a:William G. Tapply|81265|Philip R. Craig|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-M-50x66.jpg]'s second Brady Coyne novel, [b:The Dutch Blue Error|2164046|The Dutch Blue Error|William G. Tapply|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg|2169573], set in Boston and environs, where I spent my college years. I can report that Tapply "got it right" -- not just the physical geography, but perhaps more importantly, the social geography as well.

I usually like to begin with the first book in a series, but [b:Death at Charity's Point|3870000|Death at Charity's Point|William G. Tapply|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51zeo1YP-DL._SL75_.jpg|2432724] was not on the shelf at my library. I was happy to begin with [b:The Dutch Blue Error|2164046|The Dutch Blue Error|William G. Tapply|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg|2169573], though, because I have a resident philatelist who often reads the books I bring home. My in-house authority approved Mr. Tapply's writing about stamps, too.

Protagonist Brady Coyne is a successful Boston attorney with a downtown office. He's probably around 40 in 1984, when the book was published, so his law school years were in the late sixties and he had planned to become a crusading civil rights lawyer. Instead, case by case and client by client, he ended up as a personal attorney for a number of very rich people. One of them, Oliver Hazard Perry Weston, calls Brady in to assist in a stamp transaction -- all very hush-hush. Weston had thought he owned the only existing "Dutch Blue Error" stamp (the error? it should have been orange), but now has been given the opportunity to purchase another. But since Weston is confined to a wheelchair, he wants Brady to meet with the seller, have the stamp authenticated and make the exchange of cash for stamp. All seems to be going smoothly until the seller fails to show up for the final transaction. As he had used a false name, it's a few days later when Brady's interim secretary, African-American law school grad Xerxes Garrett, spots the man's photo in the Globe's obituary column. Attending the visitation, Brady learns that the would-be stamp seller was murdered in what police believe was a burglary attempt.

From there on, numerous complications arise. When Brady discovers another murder and is himself attacked, Cambridge police immediately suspect Xerxes, who rightly is offended. Brady is attracted to the first victim's daughter. And who has the stamp now? The plot twists and turns before arriving at a surprising and ironic conclusion.

There were many things I liked about the character of Brady Coyne; not least was that, unlike some fictional attorney-sleuths, he takes his duties as an officer of the court seriously. In this book at least, he seems to live in a man's world -- since his secretary is on maternity leave, the only women in the book are Deborah, the stamp-seller's daughter, and a few waitresses. Otherwise it's all golf, dinners at Jacob Wirth's with an old law-school buddy, brandy and cigars, talk of fly-fishing....I fully intend to read more of Mr. Tapply's work and will be interested to see whether that continues to be the case.