Publisher: Black Rose Writing, (October 15, 2020) Category: Mystery Thriller, Amateur Sleuth Tour dates: Oct-Nov, 2020 ISBN: 978-168433-6111 Available in Print and ebook, 268 pages
Description Dark River by Avery Jenkins
When your only path to survival is to die..
An old man loses all that he loves for a secret he doesn’t know he knows and a past he can’t remember while he searches for a girl’s killer.
Review Dark River by Avery Jenkins
Guest Review by Mark S.
“You know a little about everything, forget nothing anyone has said to you, can look at a piece of jade and know it’s age, where it was carved, by whom, and what the artist’s second child was named.”
What an interesting and enveloping novel! I felt like I was brought into to the author’s universe right from the first page and I kept wanting more. Avery Jenkins really has a talent for not only crafting a mystery, but creating a perfect small-town atmosphere that reminds me of an Agatha Christie novel, with metaphysical elements to make it even more gripping!
The story is about Asa Cire, a man who runs a very specialized antique shop that leans toward items that are difficult—and sometimes illegal—to obtain. Asa lives a fairly quiet life in a small town and he seems to have a working knowledge of everything in the universe, from dead languages to eastern wisdom to healing plants. But, at the beginning of the novel, Asa is faced with a problem even he can’t solve when he finds himself having a strange vision of a dead teenage girl during a round of meditation in his home.
Disturbed by the vision, Asa soon discovers that the teenage girl is real and was murdered in the town twenty years earlier. Her killer was never caught and the case was never solved. Asa takes it upon himself to unravel the mystery behind the brutal killing and get justice for the girl, but first he must find out how all of the pieces of the case come together, including a strange woman who showed up at his house and an ancient indecipherable manuscript.
This book is one that you will definitely want to check out. I love a good mystery and I was fascinated with the way this one played out. ‘Dark River’ is unmissable! I give it five stars.
About Avery Jenkins
Dr. Avery Jenkins is a former award-winning journalist and essayist who took a 25-year break from the writing world to become a chiropractor and acupuncturist. He holds a 2nd degree black belt in the martial art of aikido and is in his final year of training to become a Daoist priest.
Dr. Jenkins lives in northwest Connecticut with his wife and two dogs of uncertain temperament. Dark River is his first novel.
Publisher: Black Rose Writing, (October 15, 2020) Category: Mystery Thriller, Amateur Sleuth Tour dates: Oct-Nov, 2020 ISBN: 978-168433-6111 Available in Print and ebook, 268 pages
Description Dark River by Avery Jenkins
When your only path to survival is to die..
An old man loses all that he loves for a secret he doesn’t know he knows and a past he can’t remember while he searches for a girl’s killer.
Praise For Dark River by Avery Jenkins
“A Taoist Jack Reacher”-Beta Reader
“This is a fine and lively read. The perfect way to get my mind off the damn pandemic. I read it in 2 glorious evenings. Tightly written. Fast-moving. Well-drawn, interesting and multi-dimensional characters. All the action and escapism I have come to expect from a Tom Clancy or Lee Child novel, but far more interesting, and much more spiritually satisfying. The author kept teaching me things as he entertained the hell out of me. I hope he’s busy writing the next book in the series now, because I’m hooked.”-Bob Corlett, Amazon
“This book is incredible. There were twists and turns constantly; I couldn’t put it down! I can’t recommend it highly enough for a non stop story lockdown page turner.”-Lina Holopainen, Goodreads
Interview with Avery Jenkins
Hi Avery, thanks for joining me for this interview.
TR: Please tell us something about ‘Dark River’ that is not in the summary. (About the book, character you particularly enjoyed writing etc.)
AJ: Dark River is more than a suspense/mystery novel. It embodies quite a bit of Daoist and Buddhist concepts, though for the most part all of that is hidden in the walls with the plumbing. The foundation of Dark River, in fact, came from a question my sifu asked me early in my Daoist training.
“Who would you be, Avery,” he said, “if you had no memory?”
If you sit down to think about it, that’s an enormously difficult question to answer, especially for a man in his sixties with a lifetime of memories. In questing about for an answer, the essential narrative of Dark River emerged.
Themes aside Neveah Arias was the character that was the most fun to write. She is really a delightful person. She’s funny, brilliant, a courageous fighter, and takes absolutely no BS from Asa while at the same time being intensely loyal to him. And while looking out for Asa, she also looks out for herself as well. She never takes her eye off the brass ring.
Nev was the first character to come alive for me, and she dragged the rest of the characters along with her to start clamouring in my head. It hasn’t been quiet here since.
TR: What is your favorite scene in ‘Dark River’? Why?
AJ: I have two.
The last scene before the epilogue is my favorite because it is why I wrote the book. It is the point of the journey.
The prologue is my favorite in an entirely different way. It was the most difficult scene for me as an author, as I had to put my head in a truly awful space to write it. I was literally sick for two days after writing that scene. But I have a strange sense of accomplishment that I was able to write it. Without that scene being what it is, none of the rest of the book makes sense.
TR: I always enjoy looking at the names that authors choose to give their characters. Where do you derive the names of your characters? Are they based on real people you knew or now know in real life? How do you create names for your characters?
AJ: The characters in my book are drawn from a multiplicity of ethnicities and I chose names that would reflect their broader heritage while at the same time exhibiting something of their personal past. Neveah Arias hails from the Dominican Republic, while Tanya Ito is a Japanese-American woman. Charlie Glass is a European-American mutt. Asa Cire is…well, let’s just say that the man is as obscure as the origins of his name. But it, too, has meaning.
All of these characters are amalgams of people I’ve known. I’ve dipped my pen in a variety of inks to create the color that is theirs.
TR: What draws you to this genre?
AJ: I think I can really only write what I read. I love reading mysteries and suspense, and I also love reading contemporary, or metaphysical fantasy. What brings me to them as a reader is manifold. Noir detectives have always interested me in that they are so often riddled with their own fractured morality, making their path to a just conclusion painful and sometimes enlightening. They somehow manage to do the right thing, even though they don’t feel like they are. In my main character Asa Cire, I tried to create that moral ambiguity as well as the sense that there is growth occurring as his problems pile up.
I am fascinated by the way good and evil are intertwined, and books that expose the intimate dance of the two create a compelling tension. Good guys aren’t wholly good and bad guys aren’t always Satan incarnate, though we might see them that way. For me, though, it’s not so much sympathy for the devil as it is compassion for us half-broken humans staggering our way through lives we can only barely comprehend as we live them – and influenced by forces we only weakly perceive.
TR: You have said that you have drawn inspiration from Ernest Hemingway and Robert B. Parker, how does that manifest in your writing?
AJ: It means I try to put the big ideas in the verbs and nouns, not the adjectives. When writing, I constantly pare down my message into what the characters are doing and saying. There is always a need for some exposition – if for no other reason than to give your readers some space to breathe – but in trying to describe a place or a person, I try to use as few brush strokes as possible. Hemingway could describe the fullness of a man’s life in one short sentence, and that is something I strive for as well.
This also means your dialogue has to be on point, something Parker excelled at. The characters in his books have powerfully individual voices such that you don’t need to be told who is speaking. You just hear their voices in your head.
TR: How did you go from being an award-winning journalist to being a chiropractor/acupuncturist to training to become a Daoist priest? How do those experiences reflect in your writing?
AJ: Oy, that’s a whole other book, Teddy. I wrote for my dinner for 12 years, and at some point, I got tired of it. I felt like I had written or edited the same feature article hundreds of times. I wanted to do something new, but I didn’t know what, so I looked back at what had drawn me to journalism in the first place. As a teen, I had been inspired by Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage of the Watergate story, and how they had changed the course of lives – the course of a nation – through their writing. And as a journalist, I wanted to change people’s lives, to help them live better.
Once I realized that was my organizing principle, changing careers became easy. A great way to impact people’s lives directly is as a doctor, especially as a chiropractor and acupuncturist, because our relationship with our patients is more intimate. I touch my patients, I hold them, I listen to them.
As I’ve aged as a doctor, I began to realize that I was changing how I do what I do. I was not just listening to patients’ stories, but telling them stories as well, stories to help them understand their disorder or the best path through it. Writing – fiction, this time – became an extension of that practice. The best fiction always helps us to know ourselves better. It gives us hope and helps us understand our demons.
Becoming a priest is also a function of aging for me. Old men aren’t usually out on the front lines fighting – though that’s certainly where I threw my character Asa – but we are more often teaching and advising. What better way to do that than to learn what you need to know to become a priest, particularly a Daoist one?
TR: What are you currently working on?
AJ: The sequel to Dark River, titled Burning Buddha. Though Dark River stands alone as a novel, it does leave some lingering questions. Truthfully, I have a series of five books in mind to complete the story arcs of Asa and his friends. In Burning Buddha, the world gets much bigger than the small town that is Dark River’s setting, and the problems more complex. And Asa still doesn’t really know what the hell he’s doing.
About Avery Jenkins
Dr. Avery Jenkins is a former award-winning journalist and essayist who took a 25-year break from the writing world to become a chiropractor and acupuncturist. He holds a 2nd degree black belt in the martial art of aikido and is in his final year of training to become a Daoist priest.
Dr. Jenkins lives in northwest Connecticut with his wife and two dogs of uncertain temperament. Dark River is his first novel.
Dark River by Avery Jenkins
