Just Finished Reading: Plugged Nickel by Robert Campbell (FP: 1988) [219pp] 

At first, they thought it must have been a truly horrible accident. Someone must have fallen from the train and been run over, cutting them cleanly in half. It wasn’t long until the train crew found the second half and reunited them, handing over the responsibility to rail-detective Jake Hatch to get the body to the local coroner. That was when the trouble started. The local man pronounced the ‘john doe’ dead and then passed on the autopsy to his Denver colleague – who found what should have been obvious from the start: that the two halves of ‘john doe’ didn’t match... at all. For one thing, one half was male and the other female. So, TWO tragic accidents or something more like a suicide pact or maybe a murder-suicide? Travelling up and down the line on the California Zephyr, Jake Hatch had his work cut out for him. There were SO many questions unanswered. Had the two deceased known each other? Where did they get on? Why was one apparently travelling in the opposite direction from the ticket in their wallet? What had been in the empty briefcase found on the train and why were the FBI trying so hard to get in touch with Jake? Oh, and just one more thing – why was the local coroner in McCook, Nebraska acting so strangely? It was going to be a long few days and many miles of track travelled before everything became clear. 

I’d read a few novels by this author before and had always found them reasonably well written and fairly entertaining in a rather disposable way. This was another solid, somewhat above average mystery thriller which certainly kept me both intrigued and entertaining for a little over 200 pages/two days of reading. The actual mystery element was well done, and the story was sprinkled with some good characterisation which I always enjoy. The main character, Jake, was fun to ‘watch’ and the only thing I didn’t like about him was the fact that he seemed to be generally irresistible to women which I found moderately annoying and completely unnecessary to the plot. I also liked the small-town Sherrif and his wife who were good, rounded characters as well as a few of Jakes ‘girlfriends’ who seemed like an interesting bunch. This was a fun, ‘bubble-gum’, read that kept me interested and turning pages. As you might imagine quite a bit of the novel took place either on trains or in close proximity to train infrastructure so there’s some rail-speak that isn’t fully explained (as it wouldn’t be IRL) but you can pick up enough from context and if you’ve watched any old American movies that had trains in them. It certainly didn’t even slow things down a little bit and added some flavour to the whole thing. Recommended if you can source a copy.