The Tinsmith

I can only assume that I am not the target audience for Tim Bowling's The Tinsmith.

This is odd, given that I've long devoured any Civil War-themed reading I encountered. For example? you ask. April, 1865; 1861; anything written by Jeff Shaara; and of course, my all-time favorite, Gone with the Wind, (which needs no blog post by me) and Rhett Butler's People and presumably you get the idea. Also odd since I seem to be on Wild West kick (To Hell on a Fast Horse, Hell on Wheels, and high on my reading list, The Last Gunfight). Bowling's Tinsmith is a Civil War mystery that follows the two main protagonists for 20 years, from the battlefield of Antietam, where their bond was forged, to the salmon canneries of British Columbia, where they find themselves fighting many of the same forces they tried to vanquish when they wore the blue of the Union army.

The story sounded promising. So what's the problem? To begin with, it's just too bloody. From a gruesome death that is central to the story (and as the backdrop of the story is the bloodiest day in American history, you can be sure the death is pretty damn gruesome) to what seems to be gratuitous gore at the canneries (and, yes, I know it was bloody work, but still), I found myself regularly skimming chunks of the narrative, lest I see too clearly the scene being presented to me. Also, Bowling simply has too many characters. It is particularly difficult to keep up with the ones who appear on a handful of pages, disappear for 100 pages and then reappear, as if by magic, leaving the reader scratching their head at one too many coincidences (or in plain confusion). Worse, in several cases, there are sub-plots that seem to serve no greater purpose. At one point, a spiritualist arrives on the scene, but I never did figure out why (or how she was part of the larger story).

Lastly, Bowling, through his characters, seems to feel the need to remind the reader every few pages of past events, namely that the protagonists, Dr. Baird and John, first encountered one another at Antietam, that Antietam was bloody hell, and that it was a (the?) defining moment in their lives. And just for good measure, the chapters are told from different perspectives...also meaning that we hear, for example, about Antietam, over and over from different characters. More than once I thought, didn't I read those lines of dialogue 200 pages ago only to flip back and confirm that, yes, 200 pages ago I read the lines from Dr. Baird's perspective. Now I am reading them from John's.

I wanted to like this book. Very much so. But I couldn't and I didn't. If you want a fine Antietam mystery, I can highly recommend Jim Lehrer's No Certain Rest. But pass on The Tinsmith.