It's Only Rock-and-Roll... Until Somebody Gets Kidnapped (Tie Die mystery REVIEW)

There may be a worse combination than sudden fame and all the trappings of mega-success for a group of young lads, but you’ll have to work to come up with one. Or, you can just dive headfirst into Tie Die, Max Tomlinson’s delicious new thriller, to see just how bad “worse” could be…

_______________

Stevie Cook was the lead singer of an up-and-coming band—The Lost Chords—living the high life with his bandmates and rubbing elbows with the likes of the Stones in London. All of eighteen years old, he’d been swept from a normal life, to a crazy whirlwind of swinging 1960s excess, with all the booze, drugs, fancy clothes and gear, and female companionship he could lay his hands on. 

Until one morning, that is, when he woke up, hung-over after a big show, with a naked young girl stone-cold dead in the bed next to him… and everything changed, again. Only this time, for the so-much-worse.

Stevie fled Great Britain, fearing arrest, and vanished, and The Lost Chords disbanded, with only one album under their collective low-slung belts.

Cut to more than a decade later, 1978 San Francisco. A new-to-the-job private investigator, one Colleen Haynes, gets a call from a prospective client, whose daughter has been kidnapped. After accepting the usual “don’t-tell-the-police-or-else” instructions, she agrees to meet, to see if she can be of help. 

Imagine her surprise when the father turns out to be none other than Steve Cook—the lead singer of a long-ago band (which mysteriously disbanded), whose music she briefly listened to during a rough patch in her long-ago marriage—all grown up. 

Colleen still feels strongly that the police should be involved, but both her younger self and her mid-30s, seen-it-all self feel compelled to help Steve, who turns out to be a pretty nice, regular (albeit waaaay down-on-his-luck) guy. And Colleen, well… she has a pretty dark secret of her own, in the past, that she’s none-too-anxious to share with her new client, either. 

After the first attempt at delivering the ransom money gets botched big-time, though, Colleen and Steve gradually come to realize it may not be possible for either of them to keep their secrets hidden from each other… because those very secrets could make the difference between a father ever seeing his eleven-year-old daughter again… or not.

_______________

Tomlinson is a new author to me—and Colleen Hayes, a new character (although it turns out this is actually her second appearance, after his earlier Vanishing in the Haight, which I’ll definitely be going back to read, soon)—and, it turns out, a real find. I couldn’t put Tie Die down; it was that good.

Full of delightful bits of color, I ate up Tomlinson’s depiction of both  the rock scene in Swinging ‘60s London (before I was born, so really fun to read about), as well as 1978 San Francisco (and Los Angeles, which was an extra highlight for me). From the soundtrack he provides—well worth pausing one’s reading and YouTubing, at each mention—to the vivid descriptions of places, hairstyles, clothing, and cars (seriously, I have an ex who would be thrilled that Colleen drives a Torino), Tomlinson puts you in the moment and anchors you there… and it’s these touches that really take Tie Die to another level for me.

Too often, stories set in the not-that-distant past read as more wistfully-nostalgic, than compelling, entertaining, and fresh; Tie Die definitely falls under the latter style, and is not to be missed.
~GlamKitty