MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

Volume 22, Number 10

October 2023

PARKER ROBINSON mystery trilogy

(Reviewer’s Choice and Mystery/Suspense Shelf)

Critique: Unique, original, engaging, and fun, and although each title in this simply outstanding series is a stand-alone read in its own right, it is best if read in the order of “Stalking Bulls”, “Stalking Lions”, and “Stalking Chickens”. The Parker Robinson Mystery trilogy clearly showcases author Steven Thomas Oney’s genuine flair for developing inherently memorable characters and the kind of narrative driven storytelling style that will specially appeal to mystery/suspense fans. These are the kind of mystery novels that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after each of them is finished and set back upon the shelf.

PARKER ROBINSON mystery trilogy

Synopsis: Steven Thomas Oney is the author of the Parker Robinson Mysteries — a trilogy of three deftly crafted novels of mystery and suspense and a well-meaning if somewhat dysfunctional college student with a great many problems of his own. Each of the three titles comprising this outstanding premier series is produced in a digital book format (Kindle).

 https://www.amazon.com/Stalking-Bulls-Robinson-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0BQ8K5FCF

“Stalking Bulls” (9780974566870, $2.99, Kindle) Parker Robinson has a guardian aunt who thinks he’s a responsible college student but doesn’t know he’s on probation for skipping a half-semester’s worth of classes to go surfing Hawaii. He also has a Polynesian girlfriend whose face could launch a thousand outrigger canoes. He has a dog that listens only to him. He drives an antique ‘bullet’ Thunderbird that belonged to a late uncle and another uncle, who is the Boston Police Commissioner, who offers him a summer’s internship provided he not involve himself in police business.

Parker agrees. But this is before the Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum suffers its second major break-in-and-art-heist and Parker realizes he must involve himself to save his uncle’s job. However, doing so leads to unintended consequences: such as his girlfriend being kidnapped. To free her, he has to come face to face with a modern-day Minotaur (must confront it and wrestle it) even though it means pitting the monster’s brute strength against Parker’s youth.

https://www.amazon.com/Stalking-Lions-Robinson-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0BQ8MNW2X

“Stalking Lions” (9780974566887, $3.99, Kindle) You have to feel for Parker Robinson. Yes, he is now safely back at college, but he’s still on probation. What’s more, he has a floor counselor who hates his guts and wishes him dead, and the dean of the school wishes he could expel him and blames Parker for the bad publicity generated when he appeared, semi-nude, on morning network TV, as the likely suspect in a campus coed’s strangulation murder case, even though all the poor boy had done was try to go to the poor girl’s aid.

Then there is the gorgeous identical twin who thinks Parker may, in fact, be her sister’s killer, until Parker convinces her otherwise and then agrees to help her find the real killer, even if it means pretending to be a model, going to a sleazy modeling studio downtown, searching the tunnels under the Morningside campus, tracking down an absent-minded professor, attending rah-rah football games with sis-boom-bah alumni – – one of whom has very deep pockets and his eye on Parker. However, it is Parker’s bloodhound instincts that lead him from ‘the frying pan’ into the ‘fire’, or in this case from ‘the rowing tank’ into the ‘drowning vat’.

https://www.amazon.com/Stalking-Chickens-Robinson-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0BQZ8QCXL

“Stalking Chickens” (9780974566894, $4.99, Kindle) Concern is mounting for Parker Robinson. Parker’s Aunt Ruth, worried that New York City is too dangerous a place for Parker to complete his community service, has taken it upon herself to have him transferred to the wilds of western Minnesota, where she imagines it will be safer, it being the idyllic land of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Little House on the Prairie.

Now Parker’s job is to try to acquire virgin tallgrass prairies to help save the threatened Greater Prairie Chicken. But nobody informs either him or his aunt, that the Agassiz Beachline – once the Gateway to the Wild West – is as wild as ever. Peopled as it is by arsonists and hermits, smugglers and swindlers, and by crazed cowboys with psychotic tendencies that can turn violent at the drop of a Stetson.

His path leads him to burning trestle bridges, exploding grain elevators, into mystery caves and to uncomfortable meetings with a Dancing Potato tycoon, an Annie-Oakley-style sharpshooter and the seedy owner of a local strip club. Along the way, he encounters rattlesnakes, menacing gravel trucks, an out-of-control prairie wildfire, as well as a life-threatening winter storm.
The main question we are left with is: if this region is so much safer than New York City, then why has Parker received three separate attempts on his life?

Editorial Note: There is an extensive listing of novels by Steven Thomas Oney online at https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/56152.Steven_Thomas_Oney

These are the kind of mystery novels that will linger in the mind and memory of the reader long after each of them is finished and set back upon the shelf.