Pacific Book Review   

As a group of friends decide on going to the Napa Valley to celebrate one of their 50^th birthdays, the five of them, two couples and a single man chose a rented house rather than a hotel for their weekend accommodations.  So all goes as planned; arriving in SFO, renting a car, and driving up to the wine country to a villa in Sonoma named Chez Paradise.  That evening, while the group was down the hill having dinner, the villa burns to the ground; setting in motion the vacationers scrambling for alternate housing, thus needing to adjust their weekend plans accordingly.  Gerard Murrin puts so much detail into this “beginning” of his plot that it’s hard to see just where the story is going.  After all, the title of the book is in fact the name of the house that just burnt down – what’s left to talk about? 

This is where Murrin’s storytelling skill takes off, setting his book apart and ahead of the pack of ordinary mediocre novels with his fresh, vigorous use of creative credibility, confusion and conspiracies.  All of a sudden, the minutiae of details became apparently brilliant with Gerard Murrin’s plot machinations unfolding; his skillful use of foreshadowing, believable circumstances, clever situations and intuitively logical reactions of his characters.  He expertly manipulates the reader’s mind-share of information, while respecting his audience’s intelligence and having his characters act with reasonable determination.  All this is cast into a setting very well known to many people – the wine country of Northern California and Sausalito.

When one of the wives gets kidnapped and abducted, the others frantically search for her while the police apparently begin to suspect the group of arson.  Murrin introduces a key character, an ex-cop with an attitude, into the mix that helps the group solve the missing person problem, while keeping them one step out of the way of the police investigation.  The pages turn fast as the story twists like a country road. The suspense builds like the flavors of October’s crush fermenting in a barrel of wine, while the story is savored by the readers as if sampling wine from a glass; rich in color, full bodied and complex.