David Freed Strikes With Fangs Out

Cordell Logan isn't a typical flight instructor. He is a retired black ops specialist and reluctant private investigator — reluctant because he isn't a professional. Trouble tends to find and force itself on him.

He was forced into solving his first mystery when Arlo Echevarria, his former boss who stole his wife away, was murdered by a Domino's Pizza guy in Flat Spin. He is pushed into it again in Fangs Out, but this time for nothing as noble as winning over the affections of his ex-wife. He needs the money.

Fangs Out is a sequel with a little less action and a little more mystery. 

There are other reasons to accept the assignment from famed Vietnam War hero pilot Hub Walker in La Jolla. The job is unusual but sounds like a slam dunk. The way Logan sizes the job up, he'll have some extra time to rekindle a romance with his widowed ex-wife.

She lives in the area, which makes the title fit all the more. Logan is hot for a dog fight, one that leaves him just enough time to win over the woman he still pines away for. What he doesn't know is that the dog fight will come someplace else — unknown adversaries who intend to keep him from any prize.

The mystery itself starts just moments before Dorian Munz, the killer of Walker's daughter, implicates a prominent U.S. defense contractor instead. The press have a field day with the revelation. Munz gives them a motive. And the accused, Greg Castle, is Walker's best friend and his daughter's employer.

Walker wants his best friend's name cleared. If Logan can do it, the pending payday is $10,000. But nothing is ever as easy as it seems. Someone doesn't want the truth to come out. And shortly after Logan lands his beloved Cessna, the Ruptured Duck, in San Diego, he becomes a target too.

Cordell Logan is an enigma, a sarcastic contradiction. 

When Logan gave up his career as a contract killer for the military, he vowed to become a peaceful player. He now works as a civilian flight instructor with a single student. He follows Buddhism to the best of his ability. He rents a garage room from an 88-year-old landlady. And he owns a weight-challenged cat that pretends not to love him. It's not much, but he survives.

There is something else about Logan you need to know long before you pick up the book. He never met a cliche that he didn't like and frequently spouts out one liners, even in the face of mortal danger. It's almost like an addiction and is patently distracting when tied to action, which there is much less of in this more cerebral and slow-burning cat-and-mouse mystery.

There is no question that author David Freed cranks up the wit and chronic sarcasm in an attempt to make his comedic mechanism intentional. Plenty of people will appreciate it but some not so much. The difference between Logan and other comedic characters is that nothing terribly funny is happening in the story. Logan merely makes insider jokes about everything and only he and the reader are privy.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it falls flat, making Logan one part humorous and two parts annoying. Not all of his annoying traits are caused by quips alone. He is a chronic whiner, which might even explain why so many people like him but nobody really respects him, not even his cat.

David Freed is fine storyteller who shares a passion for flight. 

Even with the aforementioned shortcomings, Freed is an author that you want to cheer on. He is immediately likable, approachable and appreciates what it takes to build out a mystery cut from a film noir cloth. Never mind that the characters lean a little toward being cutouts. You can't guess at the end.

You also can't call every character a cutout. As impossible as it seems at times, the smugness isn't exclusive to imagination. Before becoming a novelist, Freed had worked as an investigative reporter, embedded journalist and with the U.S. intelligence community. Much like flying, being abuzz in sarcasm is likely a trait the character and his creator share.

Fangs Out By David Freed Flies By 5.2 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale. 

Fangs Out is an entertaining who-done-it noir mystery with a little less action than the Cordell Logan debut. Freed keeps it fresh and moving even as his reluctant modern day private investigator is grounded throughout much of the book. There is an evolution here and it will be interesting to see where it might head next.

Fangs Out by David Freed can be ordered from Barnes & Noble or you can find Fangs Out (Cordell Logan Mystery) on Amazon. You can also download the audiobook from iTunes. The book, read by Keith Szarabajka, recasts Logan with a more gravelly and less lively narration. While Szarabajka is fine, Ray Porter made the better Logan. Stick to print this time and keep an eye out for appearances by the author.

David Freed Takes On A Flat Spin

A flat spin is a worst case scenario for any pilot. The odds of recovery are slim and the plane falls, spinning, with its nose above the relative horizon. Depending on the plane, you are going down.

One might say Arlo Echevarria entered flat spin when he opened the door for a Domino's guy despite having never ordered a pizza. Any of the three slugs could have been potentially fatal wounds. Together, there wasn't anything left for Echevarria to do except drop like 164 pounds of wet laundry.

The murder was an especially sour problem for Cordell Logan, not that he didn't have enough problems already. His credit with Larry Kropf, who rented him hangar space, was running on empty. His plane, the Ruptured Duck, was in need of repairs. His conscience was still too intact to freeload on his landlady, Ms. Schmulowitz. And on any given day, his success at being Buddhist worked as well as feeding his lazy, overweight, and largely apathetic cat.

Flat Spin is also the condition of Cordell Logan's entire life.

Somehow Logan manages to take most of it in stride with a reckless calm, rippled only by his sarcastic pedestrian humor that was frequently wasted on nearly everyone he met. But Echevarria's death was different. Logan used to work under him. And Echevarria's beautiful wife Savannah Carlisle used to be his wife until his boss moved in for the steal while sending Logan on out-of-town assignments.

She is the one who tells Logan about the murder, waiting for him in his hangar after he and his student barely managed to bring the aging Cessna down on the tarmac. He hasn't seen her in six years.

Her request, however, isn't an easy one. What she wants the man who still pines away for her to do is tell the police that her suspicions are right. She believes her murdered husband worked for the government. But that doesn't make it easy for Logan, who knows her husband did.

He did too. All those business trips that he took had very little to with sales and everything to do with his work as part of a top-secret military assassination team known as "Alpha." And giving up Echevarria's former covert operations means giving up his own, an action with consequences far worse than the dangers Logan would face hunting down the killer himself.

Cordell Logan doesn't fit the stereotype, but he is a fun curmudgeon. 

Sometimes it is difficult to reconcile that Logan is a former assassin, given his lighthearted quips and cliches about everything. His skill sets tend to bubble up from time to time with foreshadowed precision  not unlike the qualities exhibited by Robert Downey Jr. in the Sherlock Holmes franchise. Like Holmes, Logan either recalls specific instructions from his past or foreshadows before the fight.

This gives the book a much more action-adventure foundation than the reluctant detective story it is meant to be, which is fine. As a character, Cordell is fun in that he is unfazed by his former occupation but severely stunted by the split with his wife and frequently conflicted in everything he does.

At times the wit and whimsy feel like they are being spun by a former journalist or clever screenwriter as opposed to the man Cordell could be, but author David Freed more than makes up for the lowbrow comedic overdose in other areas. His own professional experiences do lend authenticity to the story more times than not.

David Freed is a Pulitzer Prize winner and small plane pilot. 

There is nowhere Freed makes Cordell more comfortable in his novel than when he is flying an airplane. There is no question that both men, the author and the character, are most at home in flight. The prose in those moments is among the best written, much like the banter between Cordell and Ms. Schmulowitz (and other characters) on the far sitcom end of the spectrum.

Freed has enjoyed a diverse career as an investigative reporter, embedded journalist, and with the U.S. intelligence community. According to Freed, all that mostly occurred because he didn't have a high enough grade point average to get into law school. What he does have is a vivid imagination and a character that despite the constant buzz of author injections is one worth following as Freed is already working on the next book.

Flat Spin by David Freed Soars To 5.8 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale. 

What makes Flat Spin entertaining is the rare blend of action, adventure, mystery, and comedy while never staying in one genre too long. It's rarely forced and frequently pitch perfect as a punchy first person narrative cumulated from his years as a journalist. There is promise here as Logan matures.

You can find Flat Spin by David Freed at Barnes & Noble and Flat Spin (Cordell Logan Mystery) is available from Amazon. The novel has been produced as an audiobook, which can be downloaded from iTunes. The book is read by Ray Porter, who pushes the sardonic tenor in Logan's voice off the page and into life.