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| Hardcover, 327 pages Published 1988 Acquired December 2016 Read June 2017 |
My ongoing mission to read books set in my hometown of Cincinnati has not always yielded good literature or good local color. A lot of the books feel like they were written by someone who had never set foot in Cincinnati, even if the writer actually had! Delightfully, though, The Serpentine Wall is brimming over with local color, from the title on down. DeBrosse really captures my hometown with lots of details and jokes. The book begins with a fire on an Ohio River steamboat by the local landmark of the Serpentine Wall! The fact that Cincinnati has two major daily newspapers (though not anymore) is a key point, and there are characters seemingly derived from Larry Flynt and a combination of Simon Leis and Charles Keating (a major subplot is about pornography distribution, appropriate for Cincinnati's very moralistic climate). I don't know that it was a terribly good mystery (the villain is pretty obvious), but I loved reading it, getting that frisson of excitement every time a place or idea I knew appeared, something people who live in New York City or Los Angeles must be numb to, but which I rarely get to experience.
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