"Ukulele of Death"

E.J. Copperman’s new novel is Ukulele of Death, first in the Fran and Ken Stein Mystery series. Copperman also writes the Jersey Girl Legal Mystery series, currently represented by And Justice For Mall and soon to be joined by My Cousin Skinny. When not otherwise occupied, Copperman lives in New Jersey.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Ukulele of Death and reported the following:

I just read page 69 of Ukulele of Death and I’m horrified to say if I read just that I’m not sure I’d buy the book. It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong, but it’s mid-plot and basically an interrogation. Still, there are a few features I (as a reader) might find interesting or endearing.

The page is a moment when Fran Stein, our narrator, is interviewing the head of a group that concentrates on rare stringed instruments, because she’s looking for a somewhat rare ukulele (which you might infer from the title).

Fran being Fran – and there’s plenty you don’t know yet – she can’t help, um… embellishing her account of the interrogation.

“I pictured Foster as a man in his fifties with a mustache behind a cluttered desk in a home office,” she says. “But for all I knew he might very well have been a hipster with ironic facial hair picking a steel string guitar in a recording studio and taking a moment out to talk to some crazy lady about a Hawaiian instrument because he found it amusing. Phones are inexact instruments.”

Would that get Reader Me to plunk down some cold hard cash for this novel? I don’t think it’s an especially good indicator of the book as a whole, but it’s not so atypical that you won’t get a flavor of Fran’s style, which has been described (not by me) as “equal parts snarky, witty and loving.”

And you don’t know the really good parts yet.

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My Book, The Movie: Ukulele of Death.

--Marshal Zeringue