Stephen Jaech

King of Crows Stephen Jaech

Hal is an ambitious actor whose career is peaking. Tio, his lifelong friend, teaches at a nearby college. Without warning, their lives take a dive toward suspense and intrigue when Hal's father is murdered. Though grieving, the two friends set out to solve the mystery. Beginning on Elsa Island, a fictitious setting in South Puget Sound in Washington state, King of Crows follows a storyline template of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Sparked by a sense of justice and revenge, Hal, Tio, and Hal's fiancée, Fiona, begin an amateurish campaign to help the police catch a killer. After a climactic gathering at the home of Hal's uncle on a nearby island, the reader travels with the narrator in a loop around the continent, to California, across the South, up to New England, and then to the Maritimes in Canada before moving back to the Pacific Northwest. While King of Crows is a ghost imprint the plot of Hamlet, it presents familiar touchstones of American culture. Some elements of a mystery show themselves in the narration, of course, but the characters and their quest for justice take center stage. Just as in Shakespeare's seminal work, everyone dies! Well, not exactly everyone. Someone must remain to tell the story that includes an Elvis impersonator, a burning Volvo, boys who wear dresses, a handyman who neurotically measures everything he sees, and a badly scarred and emotionally ruined antagonist. King of Crows places a fresh spin on an old tale in this story that examines deeply flawed and broken characters who seek redemption.