Novelist Harry Dolan

continued

might be eight or nine of them at the end—I lost track.

If a local reader needs any more incentive to pick up the book, those bodies are scattered all over Ann Arbor. Our tree-studded college town starts to look dangerous! And that’s kind of fun.

Ann Arborite Harry Dolan, a first-time novelist, has the landscape right. He does more than mention the right places—Palio, the Firefly Club, coffeehouses at Liberty and State. You could almost follow his directions to the little-known Marshall Park (one of my favorite bird-watching walks), where—yes!—that shovel gets used for the first time. Dolan also seems to have some of our attitudes down. His criminals are writers, or editors, or academics who once wanted to be writers, or real writers who aren’t very good at the social games that seem so important in the writing world. Their hope for their writing—even if not the income they derive from it—is another recognizable Ann Arbor trait.