Book Review: Written in Dead Wax by Andrew Cartmel (The Vinyl Detective #1)

Stars: 3 out of 5

Pros: Fun characters and humor

Cons: Repetitive plot with a few questions lingering at the end

The Bottom Line:

Hunting a record

Quest becomes complicated

With a plot that’s flawed

There’s a Good Story Here, but You Have to Search for It

Since I’m always on the lookout for a fun new series, I was intrigued when Andrew Cartmel’s Vinyl Detective series crossed my radar.  A man with an interest in collecting rare vinyl records?  Sounds like a lot of fun to me.  Unfortunately, Written in Dead Wax wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be.

Our main character (and we never do get his name) makes his living flipping records he finds at thrift stores, when he doesn’t add them to his personal collection.  Some business cards he made as a joke where he called himself the Vinyl Detective bring a mysterious woman to his door.  Her employer, a very wealthy man, wants the Vinyl Detective to track down a very rare record, the last that a small jazz label produced in the 1960’s.  It sounds easy enough, and the fee is very generous.  However, when he finds himself being followed and someone is killed, he begins to suspect that things aren’t going to be as easy as he’d hoped.  Will he find the record?

I hadn’t realized until I sat down to write the review that we never get a name for the Vinyl Detective.  The book is narrated in first person, and it just felt natural that we never got his name.  I can’t think of any other book I’ve read where that was the case (although I do know they are out there).  However, it doesn’t make him any less of a great character.  In fact, he leads a cast I loved spending time around.  I really came to care for several of them.

It was the plot that didn’t work for me.  I was a bit surprised when I got the book and realized it was almost 500 pages.  Still, I dove in, hoping that story would make me forget the page count.  Sadly, that didn’t happen.  We got lots of repetition.  Too much repetition.  Then there’s the shift the book goes through part way through.  I get what the author was going for, but it didn’t completely work for me.  And the ending does leave me with a few questions about some whys as well.

This book is cozy adjacent.  We’ve got an amateur sleuth, but there is some language and PG-13 rated implied sex.  Keep that in mind before picking up the book.

Another thing I enjoyed was the humor.  I chuckled and laughed at quite a bit of the banter between the characters in this book.  It made the book fun reading even when the forward progress was stalled.

Since I was curious about the book, I’m not sorry I read Written in Dead Wax.  While there were things I enjoyed, the flaws were enough that I won’t be spending more time with the Vinyl Detective.