The Case of the Colonist`s Corpse

It took a while until I bought the book and it took even longer until I
read it. I only remember that Sam Cogley was a lawyer who defended Kirk
but I can`t remember who the man actually is, what personality he has. I
even don`t remember what he looks like.

Therefore when this book was announced as a Sam Cogley murder mystery,
it didn`t do anything to get me interested. When I heard that it is in
the style of Perry Mason crime novels I thought, maybe this is a book my
brother might like who is a big fan of such murder mysteries. But what
actually prompted me to buy the book was the cover. It is still very
early days, but I might vote for it as the best cover of the year.

Although I bought it for my brother`s birthday next month, all the
positive comments made me somewhat curious and I started reading. To my
surprise the book caught my interest from the very beginning. I
immediately liked Sam Cogley a lot.

I already found how he solved the first case in the book intriguing and
entertaining but the case the book is mainly dealing with is much more
interesting and kept me guessing and wondering until the very end. There
are a LOT of suspects around, something that amused me a bit but it
didn`t seem overdone to me either. All of them are interesting
characters and there is quite a variety reaching from sympathetic to
completely unlikeable so that I caught myself wishing, I hope it is X
because I can`t stand that person. But I told myself, no, that isn`t
right and by the way, usually the most obvious candidat isn`t the
murderer anyway.

What I also liked about the book is that the clues don`t seem to be
constructed and the logic how the mystery is solved at the end doesn`t
seem forced at all. I was amused that the authors completely succeeded
to fool me and the end was a surprise. The way it was explained, it made
sense to me as well and I should probably have seen this coming a long
way back. But I am not an experienced murder mystery reader. At least I
wasn`t that far off because the person who did it was not very likeable
either and was one of the two people I thought to be the most likely
candidates for having done the crime.

I guess because it is a Star Trek book after all, Kirk and the
Enterprise had to appear at least sometimes. To me, it was completely
unnecessary filler but it was nice filler.

I am hoping now that there will be more Sam Cogley murder mysteries
because I enjoyed reading this book a lot. Now I have bought the book
again for myself and I am hoping that my brother will enjoy it at least
as much as I did.

Baerbel Haddrell

Maybe one of the Pocket guys or authors or anyone who knows can answer a
question. Why did the edges of paper back books from the 50s-60s have the
color on them? When my aunt died and we cleaned out her house we found
hundreds of them from that era and they all seemed to have the colored
edges-red, green, orange, yellow, etc. This is the first time I have seen a
new book with the edges like that in thirty or more years.

Thanks
Bob
aka Butthead