Review: The Fall and Rise of Henry Milch by Marshall Thornton

Title: The Fall and Rise of Henry Milch

Series: The Wyandot County Mysteries: Book Three

Author: Marshall Thornton

Length: 234 Pages

Category: Murder Mystery

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: The Fall and Rise of Henry Milch is a journey of self-discovery, only just underway but promising some interesting firsts and developments for a guy who is—let’s just say Henry isn’t particularly altruistic. Marshall Thornton knows Henry Milch and because the author knows his character so thoroughly, readers know Henry and all his faults right down to his shallow little core.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: In the third book of the Wyandot County Mystery series, Henry is very excited: He’s just bought a car—and his old roommate in Los Angeles wants to get an apartment with him.

But then, when he stops in at his doctor’s to pick up an Oxy prescription (he’s titrating down, honest), he accidentally trips and falls on the doctor’s corpse. That leads to his being a person of interest in the murder. Now he has to clear his name before he can even think about returning to LA.

As he does, he has to contend with a friendly private eye from Grand Rapids, a long line at his local drug dealer’s, an over-crowded book club—and one very unexpected, very large surprise.

Review: I love that I was able to speak the final word in this book before I turned the page to see Henry Milch utter it himself, not at all because it was predictable but because it’s a genuine homage to the character building that I knew exactly where Henry’s mind was in that moment. Marshall Thornton knows Henry Milch and because the author knows his character so thoroughly, readers know Henry and all his faults right down to his shallow little core.

Henry is trying to clean up his act. Sort of. He’s heading back to LA any day now, for sure. Maybe. He’s definitely still goldbricking at every opportunity because under-promising and then also under-delivering means never having to work too hard. It’s that monkey on his back, though. It keeps getting in his way in a spectacular fashion in The Fall and Rise of Henry Milch, when Henry trips—literally—into murder, leaving him a suspect in his doctor’s death. Person of interest, indeed.

Pivot to the investigation. It’s a fantastic one that ties characters from the previous book, A Fabulously Unfabulous Summer for Henry Milch, to Henry’s current cluster. This is a small town, after all, so practically everyone is related anyway. It doesn’t help that the sheriff wants to pin the murder on Henry, with no evidence to uphold it, and the doctor’s widow has hired a private investigator specifically to find the proof of Henry’s guilt. Suffice to say, Henry has made no friends in Masons Bay since his inauspicious arrival. He has made a frienemy, though, if that counts. But a true friend would at least bother to stab him in the front, as Oscar Wilde once noted.

From a puzzlingly friendly private investigator, to Nana Cole being her usual self, to trying to prove his innocence, to the unexpected arrival of his mother—who brings a metric ton of her own baggage along with her—Henry’s had better days. It was a really bad time for him to face unpacking his own baggage. It was an even worse time for his Oxy pushing doctor to get himself murdered.

The Fall and Rise of Henry Milch is a journey of self-discovery, only just underway but promising some interesting firsts and developments for a guy who is—let’s just say Henry isn’t particularly altruistic. I think he’s about to step up, though, and I look forward to the journey. It’s bound to include some more murderous events too, because, for whatever reason, this town is a bloody mess.