Paper Ghosts: A Fenn Cooper Novel

by Jesse Kalfel

Overview

Fenn Cooper is a journalist in trouble. His boss has given him one last chance to write a riveting story or lose his job. He decides to write about the eccentric people who work at a travelling circus in Ithaca, New York, where silent movies where once made. There he meets Zena, a "little person" fortune teller with uncanny abilities, and her friend Holey John, a Vietnam vet whose act is piercing his flesh for five bucks a pop, as penitence for what he imagines he did in Nam.

Marvin Brinks, a Hollywood exec for a big-time movie production company, also finds himself

in trouble when he stumbles upon a one-hundred-year old contract his company inherited from a long forgotten silent movie company that was based in Ithaca. Wording in the contract would trigger an audit, and an audit would expose him for embezzling millions of dollars from the company. When he realizes that several copies of the contract are missing, he hires an assassin to find the contracts and kill any heirs.

As Fenn begins to write his story, he uncovers a connection between the long-forgotten contracts and a series of recent unsolved murders. What's more, he realizes that Zena and Holey John could be the killer's next victims. As these players converge in Ithaca, a deadly game of car and mouse ensues. Will Fenn uncover Marvin Brinks secrets and stop the murders before Zena and Holey John become the killer's next victim?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639859016
Publisher:	Fulton Books, Inc.
Publication date:	06/29/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	524
File size:	500 KB

Editorial Reviews

2024-05-22
A freelance journalist’s latest assignment threatens to give new meaning to the worddeadlinewhen he comes upon a murder mystery with century-old roots.

New York reporter Fenn Cooper is desperate for a story with “a wow factor,” something his editor calls “grab-me-by-the-balls oomph.” His latest—interviews with sex workers about why they do what they do—did not cut it. “Your next story needs to hit the ball out of the park,” Cooper’s editor demands before assigning him a piece about the last vestige of the traditional three-ring circus: the one-ring traveling circus. Easy-peasy? Anything but. Meanwhile, in California, executive Marvin Brinks faces his own deadline desperation. He’s been embezzling from his Hollywood studio to finance his expensive lifestyle and obsession with acquiring fine art and rare books. The plot thickens when Brinks learns that Chinese bankrollers are interested in investing and will want a look at the studio’s finances—he has one week to cook the books. The storylines converge when Cooper meets a denizen of the midway with distant ties to Brinks’ studio and an old contract that threatens to expose Brinks’ crimes, prompting the executive to hire an assassin to find the contract and eliminate anyone connected to it. Kalfel introduces a problematic protagonist in Cooper, a commitment-phobe who is not above cheating on his latest girlfriend with the sex workers he’s profiling. A “charming bastard” is still a bastard, and this one has an off-putting predilection for socially inappropriate remarks. Once readers get past questions about why Cooper would spend hundreds of dollars of his own money on a spec story, or why he doesn’t try to sell it to another outlet when his editor turns it down, the plot kicks in with a vivid evocation of circus life and some finely etched characters, including a diminutive fortuneteller and a sideshow act with some serious baggage.

Step right up for a sometimes cliched, sometimes surprising murder mystery.

Kirkus Reviews