More Than A Mystery: Bill Ectric’s Tamper
Good mysteries are never just mysteries. They’re usually a combination of engaging literary fiction with compelling characters, an interesting plot with twists and the skillful layering of several genres, including history, mystery, and, in the case of Bill Ectric‘s novel Tamper, also a dab or two of the paranormal. Whit, the narrator of the novel, is on an expedition to understand his past: a mystery revolving around the dissapearance of his friend, Paul Clemmons. He has an ominous dream about a bag of bones left on the side of the road and engages his friend, Roger, who co-edits their newspaper The Astral Beat, on an investigation that touches upon the paranormal.
Although his psychiatrist, Dr. Carnes, discourages such irrational inquiries, in this novel, like in the hit television series, The X Files, it’s the rational explanations that seem most implausible and the supernatural ones that appear to be the most rational hypotheses to explain an unsettling series of events. Olsen Archer, an endearing and once famous mystery writer past his prime, encourages the young men’s investigations of paranormal events.
While the novel takes readers on a journey filled with mystery and intriguing speculations, it also offers a compelling love story between Whit and his girlfriend Nancy as well as a historical snapshot of a young man’s rite of passage into adulthood during the early seventies. Like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the secrets of Tamper will keep readers engaged and are worth probing.
Claudia Moscovici, literaturesalon
About the Author
Claudia Moscovici is a Romanian-American novelist and art/literary critic. She’s the author of Velvet Totalitarianism (Rowman and Littlefield Publishing, 2009) a critically acclaimed novel about a Romanian family’s survival in an oppressive communist regime due to the strength of their love. This novel was republished in translation in her native country, Romania, under the title Intre Doua Lumi (Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011).
In 2002, she co-founded with Mexican sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto the international aesthetic movement called “postromanticism” (see http://postromanticism.com/), devoted to celebrating beauty, passion and sensuality in contemporary art. She wrote a book on Romanticism and its postromantic survival called Romanticism and Postromanticism, (Lexington Books, 2007) and taught philosophy, literature and arts and ideas at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. Most recently, she published a nonfiction book on psychopathic seduction, called Dangerous Liaisons (Hamilton Books, 2011) and a psychological thriller called The Seducer (forthcoming in March, 2012), which tells the story of a woman lured by a dangerous psychopathic predator.
My work – Fineartebooks blog- Frédéric Jousset and Bruno Julliard: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora
- The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo
- Darida Paints Brancusi
- Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories
- The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk
- Rodin’s Muses: Camille Claudel and Rose Beuret
- Art and Emotion
- Auguste Rodin and the Physicality of Emotion
- Classical Sculpture
- The Classic Style of Patrick Demarchelier
- My work – Romantic love poetry blog
- Stars orchard
- the ideal cat is one that purrs at the state’s expense, by Paul Vinicius
- the blue birds
- one of those days
- and still brancusi
- sometimes
- a story of (still) winter
- the first moment of insanity expired on an April first
- a night like a counterfeit Picasso, by Paul Vinicius
- “Poems for sick butterflies” by Lia Faur
Claudia Moscovici 