Until the Last Dog Dies

Reviewer's Bookwatch, March, 2005 by Betty Winslow

Until the Last Dog Dies

John Laurence Robinson

River Oak

c/o Cook Communications Ministries

4050 Lee Vance View, Colorado Springs, CO 80918

www.CookMinistries.com

1589190211 $12.99 381 p.

Until the Last Dog Dies is a Joe Box mystery, the second by author John Laurence Robinson. (The third Joe Box title, When Skylarks Fall, is due out from RiverOak in October 2005, and Robinson is currently writing Skin the Cat.) Sadly, the first Joe Box book, Sock Monkey Blues, is currently unavailable, as it was originally published by a Publish-On-Demand company that refuses to return the rights. Robinson is currently in negotiations with said company, and I look forward to eventually being able to read Sock Monkey Blues, too.

Meanwhile, my enjoyment of Until the Last Dog Dies was not hampered much by not having read the first book. A few questions did crop up, but none made a big difference in following what was going on (and most were answered by the end of the book, through the use of back story). Back story is often known among writers as "infodump", a pejorative term that means the author took a bunch of material he thought the reader needed to know and inserted it whole. It usually sticks out like a sore thumb and many readers skip over it without a qualm.

However, Robinson does it with scarcely a ripple by alternating chapters of Joe's present life as a newly-Christian private investigator with chapters of his past life as a skilled soldier in Vietnam. The story starts with Joe being dragged from sleep by a phone call. It's Little Bit, an army buddy he hasn't heard from in over thirty years, and it isn't good news. A man Joe and Little Bit's unit captured during the war has escaped, according to the terrified Little Bit, and he was gunning for all of them.

Joe couldn't believe it. Martin ten Eyck, the son of a powerful senator, had become a sadistic and talented killer during the war, and after Joe's unit had tracked him down and captured him, he'd been locked up for life in an asylum for the criminally insane. True, ten Eyck had sworn to kill them all, one by one, but he couldn't be out. No one would be that careless with someone that deadly.

But Little Bit has gotten a threatening phone call and he's sure it was ten Eyck, coming for him. Joe finally hangs up, still unconvinced, only to be aroused a few hours later by a call from Little Bit's wife. Little Bit is dead. He was electrocuted while working on a radio that was still plugged in. The authorities have written it off as an accident, but Joe knows better. Soldiers spend a lot of time talking, and he knows Little Bit was terrified of electricity. No way he'd have been working on something still plugged in.

Then, Joe begins to find out about other deaths in the unit. Vlad, who feared blood and being shot at, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot. Ed, who's afraid of driving and always lets others drive him around, dead at the bottom of a cliff in a car he was supposedly driving. Each man had died in the way he'd been most terrified of, and Joe can't convince the authorities that they were murdered. Then, there are more murders, and now Joe is one of only three men left alive. Time to find out what's going on!

When he talks to one of ten Eyck's doctors from the asylum, he discovers that ten Eyck is even more dangerous than before. Over the thirty years ten Eyck has been imprisoned, the asylum treatments have included LSD and unrestricted involvement with the occult. As a result, ten Eyck is possessed by more evil than Joe has ever faced before. He may not be able to stop him from killing again, but--armed with a borrowed gun and backed up by the prayers of the church he attends--he has to try, for it isn't just Joe in danger now, it's everyone he cares about. Will his faith in God, bolstered by prayer, be enough to help Joe stop ten Eyck from killing again?