Goofy Foot: An Alex Rasmussen Mystery

David Daniel's descriptions of place and atmosphere in GOOFY FOOT are right on the mark. In the seaside town of Standish you can feel the salt air and hear bar music drifting through the fog. "Goofy foot" is slang for a surfer who leads with the off-foot. But it also means "how you sometimes get the intuitive stuff...inklings." The reader, like Alex himself, gets inklings of what's going on and comes to understand things intuitively, the way it usually happens in real life. With another writer this lack of specificity might be annoying, but Daniel has brought the reader so completely into the story, and Alex has been so honest with his thoughts, that in GOOFY FOOT all seems as it should be. This was an all-around super book! I loved it, just the way I loved Daniel's last book, WHITE RABBIT. So it looks like David Daniel is just a terrific writer and anything he produces has a good chance of being a great read.

In the third book in the Alex Rasmussen mystery series David Daniel gives us a book which is hard to put down and even harder to figure out who is who and what is what.In a background of aging surfers, small town police, missing persons and get rich land barons, we find our hero trying to figure out who is missing and who is dead. As he travels from Lowell to a small Massachusetts vacation resort town to try and find a missing father and daughter, Alex runs into more intrigue and trouble than he baragins for. If you are a fan of the Alex Rasmussen series, you will love this book and if you are just now reading your first A.R. mystery, I am sure that you will want to catch up with the others.Surf's up, dudes, but the waves are high and treacherous in this non-stop thriller. Grab your board and go for the ride of your life.

After last year's excellent and underrated classic, "White Rabbit" David Daniel's returns with "Goofy Foot" the third installment of his Alex Rasmussen mystery series. Though the plot of a missing girl is less than innovative, Daniel structures it nicely and his character development is par excellence. "Goofy Foot" bounces from great storytelling to literature in a way that keeps the pages turning. His protagonist, hard-boiled Alex Rasmussen is a modern day Philip Marlowe. In the Lowell settings, you can feel at once the working-class pride and the grinding existence, and the reader looks forward to his next Rasmussen blues' book and his "Ghost of Kerouac."Daniel has stories to tell.

In Lowell, Massachusetts, Paula Jensen hires private sleuth Alex Rasmussen because she has not heard from her daughter Michelle in two days. Paula explains that Michelle was visiting her father Ben Nickerson in California, but should have been home by now even with Ben breaking their agreement and driving her home cross country, but they should have arrived already.Alex makes inquiries and quickly learns that the seemingly perfect family paragon of the Jensen household is a fake. Michelle's sister Katie insists that her sibling has a strained relationship with her mom and especially her stepfather Ross. The local Police Chief Delcastro feels there is nothing to investigate as two bickering parents are involved and the teen will show up. Besides Michelle missing, Ben also seems to have vanished. When the last known person to admit to seeing Ben alive suddenly dies in a dubious car crash, Alex knows that his client's teenage daughter in danger, but anyone who might be able to help seems lethargically reluctant to get involved.In some ways this delightful private investigate tale reads more like a cozy as the cast led by the hero is passive to the extreme of wondering if anyone is breathing in Massachusetts. Thus anyone seeking brawls inside a suburban noir should look elsewhere. However, readers who appreciate a solid leg work sleuth tale starring an amiable protagonist will enjoy David Daniel's cold footed detective story that is no warm day at the beach.Harriet Klausner