Welcome to our OOL
No Pea in the Pool follows a sweet little pea who is ready for a day of swimming with her friends when she realizes she forgot one very important thing before leaving home: going potty! What was the inspiration for your story?
It took me over a decade to write this book, get it illustrated, publish it, and put it out into the world… and it all started when I was on tour as a songwriter and decided to go swimming at a hotel we were staying at while on the road.
As I was walking toward the chairs to set my towel down, I noticed a sign that read:
“Welcome to our OOL. Please leave the P out of it!”
It’s a good thing no one else was on the pool deck because I burst out laughing. It was hilarious!
Afterward, I was telling my husband about the sign, but just thinking about it cracked me up again, and he couldn’t understand a word I was saying. In between giggles, I finally got it out: “The sign says OOL, so there’s no P in the Pool.”
That’s when it hit me. I saw the character so clearly in my mind.
What if it hadn’t been the letter P… but an adorable little pea who wanted to go swimming? What if there was some reason this pea couldn’t go in the pool?
That was the moment NO PEA IN THE POOL was born.
When I started working on it, I used my songwriting background to create my children’s book in a lyrical, rhyming style.
What do you think makes humor such an effective way to introduce practical lessons to young children?
When stories are fun to read, kids revisit those books again and again… and repetition is an incredible teacher.
When I was little, I re-read my favorite bedtime stories so often that I had them all memorized. Decades later, I can still recite many of them to this day.
But there’s something even deeper than that….
As a reader myself (and as a novelist), I gravitate toward books where the lesson is a natural, inevitable result of the journey the characters went on. Story is my number one focus, always!
For my children’s books, I want the experience to feel like: “Hey, we just had a lot of fun and made new friends… and wow, we learned something, too!”
The illustrations contain jokes and details beyond the words themselves. How did you approach making the pictures another part of the humor?
My illustrator and I had a blast with all the tiny details! One of my favorite moments is when Pea sees the Dalmatian peeing on the hydrant and realizes that isn’t an option for her. Also, the onion crying! I knew I wanted a character to slip and fall with Rule #1: No Running. That background character could have been anything – a banana could have been cute… but the idea of an onion crying felt like the more unique, funny visual choice.
The fun is in the details, quite literally! Look at the sunscreen bottle, it says S-PEA-F! And on the back cover above the barcode, it says MSR-PEA.
One visual joke also solved a practical problem: in a world of fruit and veggie houses, what structure is a public restroom? I knew that making it another fruit or veggie just didn’t feel right. When I came up with the concept for a watering can, I felt that was both funny and perfect for the setting. And my illustrator executed it perfectly!!
It’s not just humor, there’s foreshadowing in the illustrations, too. Notice the picture on the easel in Sweet Pea’s room? She drew a Dalmatian! Then we meet the dog a few pages later. It’s such a tiny detail you could easily miss, but it adds to the richness of the world. The family photos in her living room are another clue: we’ll meet all of those characters in stories to come.
Could Sweet Pea, the Spelling Bee, or the other characters return for another adventure?
Absolutely! My illustrator and I are currently finishing book #2 in the series, THE PRINCESS IS THE PEA, which stars Sweet Pea as Princess Pea. After that, we’ll release PEA-B-J, featuring Sweet Pea’s twin brother, Pete Pea. (Look closely at Sweet Pea’s bedroom in NO PEA IN THE POOL… she drew a picture of her brother there, too!)
Right now on my website, PlanetPea.com, you can meet several of the characters, find out their hobbies, and discover which books each will appear in. And best of all… the experience is interactive!
Play a spelling game with the Spelling Bee. Complete a maze to help Pea, Carrot, and Apple find their way to a pool, or download printable pictures of your favorite characters to color at home. All of it is 100% free and promotes learning and creativity through fun!
Author Links: GoodReads | Instagram | Facebook | Free Coloring Pages | Games | Pea-Mail – Substack | Website
Should Sweet Pea… pee in the pool?
NO PEA IN THE POOL is a rhyming picture book perfect for ages 3 to 6 sure to make a splash at storytime! With cheerful illustrations, lovable characters, and a story made for giggles, NO PEA IN THE POOL is a delightful read-aloud little ones will want to dive into again and again.
Not Difficult, Just Excited
Made to Fly Free follows an impatient young robin who longs to soar before his wings are ready and learns that courage, growth, and freedom sometimes begin with patience. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Made to Fly Free was inspired by watching robin families nesting in our own backyard. There was one spring when my children were fascinated with a mother robin and her baby as she seemingly taught him to fly. The kids affectionately named the baby robin Little Peep and called his mama “Squawk” because of all the chatter that resulted in what appeared to be her flight lessons. That was when the story seed was planted, as I began to imagine how their conversations might have played out.
One spring when I was working out the heart of the story, it just so happened that another robin family built a nest right outside our kitchen window. My family and I had a front-row seat as the eggs hatched and the babies grew. We watched how both the mama and papa robins played an active role in caring for the nestlings. I started to imagine what it might be like for a baby bird who could see this whole big world beyond the nest but wasn’t quite ready to join it yet. And that became the heart of the story: wanting the freedom to fly while still needing the time to grow into it. As a mom of five kiddos, I found there’s something quite familiar in that tension!
How did you develop Little Peep’s personality so that his impatience would feel relatable to young children?
I wanted Little Peep’s impatience to come from a good place. It’s not that he’s trying to be difficult; he’s just excited! He watches the children “flying” free on the swing below him, and he wants so badly to experience that same freedom. It’s his natural instinct to want to fly. What he doesn’t know yet is that he will someday be able to surpass even the delightful freedom the children experience on that swing.
I think children understand that feeling instinctively. There are so many things they see older kids or adults doing that they’re eager to do, too, and “not yet” can be a very hard answer. I let Little Peep be enthusiastic, determined, and even a little dramatic at times. His desire to fly isn’t wrong; he just needs time for his wings to become strong enough to carry him. Then, of course, there’s the tension all children have experienced when it finally comes time to try the new thing for the first time—that moment when courage has to win over fear.
The book uses repetition, rhyme, and playful sounds throughout. How important was the read-aloud experience while you were writing it?
The read-aloud experience was incredibly important. Reading aloud has always been a big part of our family, and my children seemed to naturally gravitate toward books with playful words and lyrical storytelling. I read Made to Fly Free aloud over and over during the revision process, sometimes to my kids and plenty of times to myself. Reading aloud catches so many things your eyes don’t. You hear where rhythm stumbles, where a sentence runs too long, or where repetition starts to feel fun.
I also loved playing with sounds like “slurp,” “gulp,” and “squawk” because they give kids something to anticipate and join in with. There are several uses of “flutter, flutter, flutter” because I wanted readers to feel Little Peep’s momentum building along with his determination to fly free. I think that when the language is fun for a parent to read aloud, it becomes familiar enough after a couple of readings that a child might start saying parts of it right along with them.
What was the collaboration process like with illustrator Hannah Bird, especially for the energetic scenes of Peep learning to fly?
I first connected with Hannah when I saw how perfectly her work fit the vision I had for this picture book. After we met over Zoom, I walked away with such excitement because we connected on a deeper level. She valued the wholesomeness of my story, and I could see we had a strong values alignment.
Hannah immediately got to work on the sketches. There were some pages and spreads where I had a very specific concept in mind, but there were others where I had no idea what to do. In those places, I invited Hannah to put her artistic imagination to work. She captured Little Peep’s many expressions in a way that surpassed my expectations. I especially loved her addition of Little Peep’s heart in the second “flutter, flutter, flutter” sequence.
One of my favorite spreads Hannah illustrated is Little Peep’s first flight. The chaotic motion she captured paired perfectly with the action words hand-lettered by my daughter Hope, who designed the book layout. The collaboration between Hannah, Hope, and me made the story so much stronger than I could have ever imagined.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Instagram | Website
The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow: Essays on Meaning
John Bliss’s The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow is an ambitious collection of thirteen interconnected essays examining how human beings construct their understanding of reality. Bliss moves across psychology, science, history, religion, philosophy, morality, and group behavior to argue that many of the assumptions people treat as settled truths are products of limited perception, inherited belief systems, and social conditioning. Early in the book, he states the epistemological premise that guides the essays: “We can never know what is true.” From that starting point, the book asks readers to reconsider their confidence in progress, rationality, scientific certainty, individual autonomy, and the belief that people arrive independently at their convictions. Bliss deliberately develops his argument as a collection of connected ideas, allowing recurring themes to accumulate until a larger philosophical position becomes visible.
The first half of the book is particularly concerned with the forces that shape thought. Bliss’s discussion of schemas shows how people filter information through beliefs that have become intertwined with identity, while his essays on groups extend the same principle into institutions, religions, corporations, governments, and societies. His treatment of science follows a similar pattern. Bliss recognizes science as one of humanity’s great practical achievements while questioning the elevation of scientific theories into unquestionable descriptions of reality. His discussions of Hume, mechanistic thinking, mathematics, perception, and the limits of the senses broaden this argument into a critique of human certainty itself. These subjects are supported by a remarkably wide range of historical and intellectual examples, from the Roman Republic and the medieval Church to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Newton, corporate scandals, psychological experiments, and modern political movements. The result is a book that continually places familiar assumptions in unfamiliar contexts.
The second half shifts from dismantling assumptions toward constructing a philosophy of meaning. Religion, mystical experience, history, intuition, and collective consciousness become increasingly important as Bliss develops his distinction between institutional religion and direct spiritual experience. Figures including Ramakrishna, Krishnamurti, Emerson, Swedenborg, Jung, Toynbee, and Hegel contribute to a widening argument that individual human lives participate in something larger than themselves. History consequently becomes more than a record of events. Bliss interprets it as the long development of human consciousness, with civilizations and individuals contributing to an unfolding collective process. His exploration of Emerson’s Over-Soul, Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and related concepts prepares the ground for the book’s central conclusion: “Humanity should be viewed as a whole, rather than as a collection of individuals.” What begins as skepticism about human knowledge gradually develops into a positive ethical and spiritual vision centered on interconnectedness.
The book’s greatest strength lies in the scale of that synthesis. Bliss brings centuries of philosophy, history, religion, psychology, and scientific debate into conversation with one another while maintaining a recognizable central concern: how humanity might adopt a worldview better suited to its continuing development. His style is direct, personal, and frequently provocative, and the repeated summaries at the ends of the essays reinforce the connections among subjects that can initially seem distant from one another. Some of the book’s broad historical and scientific claims invite scrutiny, and its strongest assertions sometimes depend more heavily on philosophical interpretation than demonstration. That quality is also central to the book’s purpose, since Bliss is attempting to provoke reconsideration of foundational assumptions. By the end, The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow emerges as a sustained inquiry into certainty, meaning, freedom, spirituality, and human identity, culminating in the proposal that the next significant change in human consciousness may depend on seeing humanity itself as the fundamental unit to which each individual belongs.
Pages: 496 | ASIN : B0FPMWBNRC
The Million Dollar Hurdle: How Small Businesses Can Leap to Seven-Figure Revenue and Beyond
Jim Fitzgerald’s The Million Dollar Hurdle is a practical guide for owners who’ve already built a functioning business and now need to turn that business into something more scalable. Fitzgerald’s central argument is that the leap from six figures to seven figures usually depends less on one brilliant idea than on fixing a collection of ordinary weaknesses: hiring, culture, management, customer retention, branding, marketing, data, delegation, and decision-making. The book is organized around that progression, beginning with diagnosis and stabilization before moving into growth and higher-level leadership. The Million-Dollar Scorecard gives the structure some teeth by asking readers to identify their weakest area and focus there first .
What makes the book engaging is Fitzgerald’s voice. He writes like an experienced business owner talking across a table to another owner, with plenty of humor, blunt observations, and stories from his years building Taradel. The examples tend to involve recognizable small businesses such as contractors, dentists, restaurants, lawn-care companies, and local service providers, which keeps the advice grounded. His stories about hiring for culture, developing strategic partnerships, improving customer retention, and learning to delegate make the broader principles easy to picture in practice. The book also has a strong bias toward action. Fitzgerald regularly asks the reader to examine an office, track a marketing campaign, study customer data, rethink a hiring process, or hand real responsibility to someone else. That makes it feel closer to a working manual than a collection of business theories.
I liked it when Fitzgerald shows how seemingly separate parts of a company affect one another. Marketing works better when the brand is credible. A strong brand depends on customer experience. Customer experience depends on good hiring, management, and culture. Growth becomes easier when customers and employees stay, and it becomes sustainable when the owner stops serving as the bottleneck. That connected view of a business gives the book more substance than any individual tactic. I especially liked the later chapters on using data, finding a defensible niche, and making yourself replaceable. Fitzgerald argues that a real business should eventually become an asset that can function without its founder constantly intervening, and that idea gives the earlier advice about systems and people a clear destination.
I recommend The Million Dollar Hurdle to an owner of an established small or midsize business who has real customers and revenue but feels trapped in day-to-day operations. It should especially appeal to hands-on founders in service businesses, local companies, agencies, trades, professional practices, and similar organizations where the owner has grown by being good at the work and now has to become good at building the company around that work. Fitzgerald understands the peculiar stage where success has created more responsibility without yet creating more freedom, and he gives readers a sensible route through it. The final chapter also gives the book a welcome human dimension by reminding entrepreneurs that growth is supposed to create a better life, and that family, rest, friendships, and the satisfaction of the work deserve attention along the way.
Pages: 224 | ASIN: B0H6C13R3G
Beneath the Canopy
Beneath the Canopy brings Nazi-occupied Netherlands to life through the eyes of two twelve-year-olds who are close in geography but living remarkably different versions of the same war. Johanna is carrying responsibilities far beyond her years as she tries to protect her younger sister and keep her family together. Rein, largely left to fend for himself, scavenges, steals bread, dodges soldiers, and leans on humor and nerve to survive. Moving between their perspectives gives the novel an immediate, intimate quality. History is happening all around them, but what matters most on the page is often painfully simple: finding food, staying warm, getting home, protecting someone you love.
Lynda Riggers has a real feel for the details that make wartime deprivation understandable on a human scale. Johanna’s compulsive counting becomes both a character trait and a way of measuring a world she can’t control. Rein’s hunger, bravado, loneliness, and fierce attachment to his brother give his chapters a different rhythm, sometimes funny and sometimes devastating. The book is especially effective when those ordinary childhood impulses collide with the realities of occupation. A loaf of bread can feel like treasure. A pair of wooden shoes can become an act of grace. A childhood crush can briefly make the war recede. Those moments give the story warmth without softening what these children are living through.
The novel also makes room for complicated questions about survival, loyalty, prejudice, courage, and kindness. Rein’s relationship with Heinrich, a Nazi officer who helps feed him, is particularly compelling because Rein has to hold two truths at once: this man belongs to the force that has brutalized his country, and this same man has shown him mercy. Johanna’s journey has its own moral and emotional weight as responsibility pushes her toward a maturity she never asked for. Around them are Resistance members, collaborators, frightened civilians, starving families, displaced people, and children trying to decide what kind of adults they can trust. Riggers keeps returning to individual choices, showing how enormous history is experienced through small decisions that can save a life, betray a friend, or offer a little dignity.
What gives Beneath the Canopy its deepest resonance is knowing that its fictional story grew from the lives of real people. By the time liberation arrives, survival doesn’t erase what Johanna and Rein have endured, but it gives them the chance to imagine a future again. The final pages understand that home can mean more than a building and that freedom can arrive carrying grief alongside joy. The author’s note adds another layer by revealing what became of the people behind the characters, including losses that remained unanswered for decades. It leaves the reader thinking about how family stories survive, how trauma travels through generations, and how easily history disappears when nobody keeps telling it. Beneath the Canopy turns history into something we can feel, reminding us that the past stays alive when we remember the people who had to survive it.
Pages: 222 | ASIN : B0HHNSW6M4
Phantom Ranch
Scott Wells’s Phantom Ranch is a psychological survival thriller built around two kinds of danger: the physical threat of the Grand Canyon and the damage people carry into it. The novel follows Ben Brady as he undertakes a Christmas hike with his estranged brother Todd and close friends Robert and Christy, fulfilling his late father Sonny’s wish that the brothers make the trip together. Running alongside their journey is the story of a violent fugitive who calls himself Mark, a predator hiding deep in the canyon and gradually moving into their path. Wells establishes early that the landscape will do more than provide scenery. The canyon watches, conceals, echoes, and preserves secrets, giving the book an almost supernatural sense of menace even when the danger is entirely human. That combination gives Phantom Ranch its identity: part wilderness thriller, part family drama, and part story about what people do with the things that have hurt them.
The emotional center is Ben, and his complicated relationship with Todd gives the suspense more weight than a straightforward stalk-and-survive story would have. Their history includes cruelty, homophobia, violence, and childhood trauma, so the hike carries years of unresolved anger down the trail with them. Sonny’s death gives them a reason to be together, but the canyon becomes the place where they’re finally forced to see one another without the familiar family roles surrounding them. One of the book’s strongest choices is allowing that change to happen through small experiences as well as dramatic ones: a near fall, shared memories of their father, jokes that only brothers understand, and the scattering of Sonny’s ashes over the canyon. By the time Todd begins to recognize that Ben has never asked him to change his beliefs, only to treat him with the same dignity Todd expects for himself, the trip has become as much about emotional survival as physical survival. That makes Todd’s arc the novel’s boldest element because Wells asks readers to hold the seriousness of his past behavior alongside his capacity to change.
There are echoes here of Stephen King, particularly The Shining, in the way Wells uses an isolated place to put pressure on damaged relationships. King’s Overlook Hotel seems to absorb and amplify what a family brings into it, and Wells gives the Grand Canyon a similar presence. The difference in setting produces a very different kind of energy. Here, exposure replaces confinement: cliffs, ice, darkness, distance, exhaustion, and the knowledge that help may be hours away. Wells also embraces a broader tonal mix than pure horror. There are turkey chases, road-trip insults, Christmas presents, crude jokes, friendship, sex, grief, family memories, and sudden eruptions of graphic violence. That range makes the characters feel as though they had lives before the thriller machinery reached them. Mark, meanwhile, becomes increasingly disturbing through his fixation on condors, stalking, trophies, and control. His obsession eventually turns the bird imagery back on him in a particularly fitting piece of narrative symmetry when the creatures he admires become the ones that find what remains of him.
What I liked most wasn’t the serial-killer plot by itself, but the way Wells connects survival to belonging. Ben enters the canyon carrying grief, fear, memories of abuse, and a lifetime of having parts of himself judged by people he loves. He leaves having survived something almost unimaginably violent, but the book keeps going long enough to show why surviving matters. The final family gathering and Ben and Kent’s wedding give the story a destination beyond escape, with Todd standing beside his brother as best man and Sonny represented by a photograph saved for the ceremony. Wells makes his purpose especially clear in the author’s note, where he describes the story as growing from his own journey through silence, shame, acceptance, and survival. That personal investment comes through on the page. Phantom Ranch is a raw and cinematic thriller with a surprisingly earnest heart, one that treats the climb out of the canyon as both a feat of endurance and a metaphor for finally finding your way home.
Pages: 280 | ASIN: B0H46SVRV3
Blueland
Robert Jaxx’s Blueland is a sprawling Western about what happens after a war ends but the fighting inside people, families, and a country keeps going. The novel begins in the final days of the Civil War with Union captain Alden Zur and the men who have survived alongside him, then follows Alden west as he tries to build a life with his family in Colorado. What starts as a story about veterans and settlers gradually widens into a generational story about ranchers, soldiers, Native people, outlaws, lawmen, speculators, and young men trying to figure out what kind of lives they want. Blueland itself becomes more than a destination. It’s a place where people arrive carrying old loyalties and grudges, then discover that the West is changing almost as quickly as they can settle it.
Alden is the novel’s center of gravity for much of the story. He’s stubborn, sarcastic, protective, capable of violence, and fiercely loyal to the people he considers his own. His wartime friendships with Eugene Byrd, Jesse Turnbull, and Charlie Rudolph give the book a strong sense of history between its characters, and that history follows them into civilian life. Some of the book’s warmest moments come from watching these men trade insults, drink together, help one another, and try to turn survival into something resembling a future. Alden’s wonder at Colorado captures that transition especially well when he tells Edda, “I feel like I see God wherever I look.” It’s a simple line, but it explains a lot about what Blueland means to him. After years of destruction, he sees the land as a chance to make something permanent.
The novel also has a much larger canvas than the Zur family. Nocona and Chogan, two Kickapoo brothers, become important figures in a story that repeatedly confronts the violence directed at Native people during westward expansion. Their presence gives the book another perspective on the same landscape Alden finds so beautiful. For settlers, the territory can represent opportunity. For Native people, that same movement west often means displacement, military violence, and the destruction of communities. Jaxx connects those experiences through encounters, and the relationships that develop between Nocona, Jesse, Alden, and others give the story some of its strongest moral weight. Chogan’s blunt observation that “White men only care about white people” lands because the novel spends so much time showing the consequences behind it.
As the story moves forward in time, Blueland becomes increasingly generational. Alden’s son Levi and his friend Arliss take on larger roles, traveling through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, and eventually San Francisco while encountering racism, gun violence, corruption, and the lure of money. Their friendship has an easy humor that helps lighten a book with an unusually high body count. That violence is part of the novel’s style. People can die suddenly from murder, accidents, floods, disease, or simple bad luck, and the frontier rarely allows much time for mourning before the next problem arrives. At times, the sheer number of villains, shootouts, disasters, and deaths gives the book an episodic feeling, almost like a long series of Western tales joined by the same families and friendships. Still, that accumulation serves a purpose. Life in Blueland feels unstable even when the characters are building homes, businesses, romances, and ranches.
What stayed with me most was the way the novel connects settlement with change. The characters spend decades trying to claim a place in the world, yet railroads, mining, expanding towns, cattle and sheep conflicts, racial tensions, and new generations keep reshaping that world around them. Even Alden, who seems capable of surviving almost anything, can’t control what comes next. His death late in the book gives the final chapter a real sense of transition, especially as Levi and Arliss prepare to ride north to discuss a railroad route across the family’s land. That ending fits the novel well. Blueland is a Western about movement, inheritance, friendship, family, and the uneasy process of turning open country into a society. The land may look permanent, but nearly everyone living on it is being pushed toward something new.
Pages: 320 | ASIN : B0H8QC7R1K
Hunting the Red Fox
Hunting the Red Fox by W. Kenneth Tyler, Jr. is the kind of novel that feels like sitting down with a gifted, slightly mischievous older man who casually mentions that he once stole a 200-carat diamond, fought behind enemy lines during World War II, played professional golf with legends, knew Hollywood stars, and spent a good portion of his younger years charming women and breaking rules. Roger Mace, an aspiring writer looking for extraordinary stories from ordinary people, meets eighty-two-year-old Perry Barnes on a golf trip and quickly discovers that Perry could fill a book by himself. From there, Perry takes Roger through a life shaped by Depression-era Savannah, the violent loss of his father, petty crime, specialized Army training, wartime missions, professional golf, jewel theft, romance, and eventually the hunt for a criminal known as the Red Fox. Tyler wisely gives Roger a skeptical voice throughout, so the reader gets to share his recurring thought: can one man really have lived all of this? That tension between disbelief and fascination becomes part of the fun.
Perry is what holds the sprawling story together. He’s charming, vain, observant, funny, reckless, sentimental, and far more complicated than his polished gentleman routine initially suggests. His childhood talent for reading people, gambling on golf, and stealing eventually combines with military training in languages, sabotage, infiltration, and survival, creating a man whose legal and illegal talents are almost impossible to separate. That becomes especially entertaining when Perry returns to jewel theft in the 1950s, convincing himself he’s behaving like Robin Hood by stealing from wealthy people who mistreat their employees and secretly directing the proceeds to those workers. The thefts aren’t simply side adventures. They reveal something essential about Perry. He craves the intellectual puzzle and adrenaline almost as much as he wants to believe he’s doing the right thing. Tyler also has a fondness for detail, whether he’s describing a golf hole, a mansion, a military operation, a piece of jewelry, or a complicated theft. That gives the novel the texture of a long story told over drinks, where one memory leads naturally into another and the storyteller enjoys the telling nearly as much as the listener enjoys hearing it.
There’s something of Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump in the novel’s approach to history. Like Groom, Tyler sends a fictional man wandering through real twentieth-century America and lets him brush shoulders with people readers already know. Perry encounters figures such as Winston Churchill, Howard Hughes, Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and some of professional golf’s biggest names, and he treats those encounters with an amusing casualness. Where Groom gives Forrest innocence and happenstance, Tyler gives Perry calculation, swagger, appetites, and a con man’s eye for opportunity. That makes Hunting the Red Fox feel part historical adventure, part crime caper, part golf novel, and part exaggerated fireside memoir. The later arrival of Sophia Toscana gives all of those threads a satisfying place to meet. She’s a talented jewelry detective pursuing the Red Fox, while Perry is a former jewel thief who can understand the criminal precisely because he thinks like one. Their investigation turns the final portion of the book into a genuine cat-and-mouse story, culminating in the theft of the Mecklenburg Diamond, Perry’s confrontation with Clarence Desmond, and a dangerous showdown that finally forces Perry to decide what he values more than excitement.
What stayed with me most, though, wasn’t the diamond or even the Red Fox. It was the way Perry’s entire story gradually becomes an argument about growing up. At the beginning, he tells Roger that returning the Mecklenburg Diamond marked the end of his life as a thief and con man because love and family had finally become more important to him. The rest of the novel spends hundreds of pages showing how difficult it was for him to reach that conclusion. Sophia matters because she presents Perry with something none of his adventures can provide: a reason to stop roaming. Even then, he nearly ruins it by falling back into old habits and running away from commitment. The final revelation that Sophia became Mrs. Barnes, that they built a family and founded a successful detective agency together, gives the book a warm and fitting payoff. Perry doesn’t simply abandon his unusual talents. He finally figures out where to put them. That makes Hunting the Red Fox a big, talkative, frequently funny life story about a man who spends decades mastering how to escape almost anything before realizing that the best part of his life begins when he finally finds something he doesn’t want to escape from.
Pages: 300 | ASIN : B0F1FW1KKQ
