The Run-Out Groove
Vinyl Detective 2
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3.7 • 10 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
His first adventure consisted of the search for a rare record; his second begins with the discovery of one. When a mint copy of the final album by “Valerian”—England’s great lost rock band of the 1960s—surfaces in a charity shop, all hell breaks loose.
Finding this record triggers a chain of events culminating in our hero learning the true fate of the singer Valerian, who died under equivocal circumstances just after—or was it just before?—the abduction of her two-year-old son.
Along the way, the Vinyl Detective finds himself marked for death, at the wrong end of a shotgun, and unknowingly dosed with LSD as a prelude to being burned alive. And then there’s the grave robbing…
But he does find out what happened to the missing child, and it wasn’t what anyone expected—or wanted—to hear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Cartmel's entertaining second record-spinning mystery finds the eponymous hero, otherwise unnamed, living in London with Nevada Warren, who hired him in the series debut, 2016's Written in Dead Wax. When John Drummond, who likes to be called Colonel, and Drummond's companion, self-styled journalist Lucille Tegmark, call on the vinyl detective, they first express interest in a rare 45 rpm single, "All the Cats Love Valerian," which they spotted on his blog. But this is just the lead-up to what the bickering couple really want: to hire him to investigate the disappearance of the infant son of Drummond's notorious singer sister, Valerian, who committed suicide in 1967 around the time the boy went missing. Encouraged by Nevada, the vinyl detective takes on the case. Cartmel treats music and records seriously, plays his strange characters for laughs, and provides a bit of danger and some unexpected twists in this affectionate nod to the vagaries of rock stardom.
