![]() A couple of summers ago, my dad and I took a drive from his home in Cass City, Michigan out to the ghost town of Tyre, Michigan, in Austin Township. While, at one time, it was a bustling farm village with two general stores, a post office, church, hotel, and a railroad depot, among other things, it is little more than a crossroads today. As we drove through, the setting reminded me of Whistlestop, the fictional town in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. Little did I know, at the time, Whistlestop and Tyre share more than visual similarities; they are both scenes of mysterious murders. Jacki Howard’s The Thumb Pointed Fingers tells, in novel form, the story of the murders of the Sparling men at the turn of the 20th century, in Tyre. First, J.W. passes away in 1909, due to an unknown illness; he was followed by son Peter in 1910, and both sons Albert and Scyrel in 1911, all of whom died of painful illnesses doctors later diagnosed as arsenic poisoning. The first two-thirds of the book tells the story of the Sparling family and the untimely deaths of the Sparling men. The last third of the book, beginning with chapter 43, is where it gets good. The bulk of it is a fascinating transcript of the trial proceedings of the accused (I won’t tell you who it is), and is, by far, the best portion of dialogue in the novel. Despite the interesting story, the novel lacks literary color. The writing is plain and the characters are not well-developed. The readers is often told what a person does, instead of it being described for them, allowing the description to bring the people to life. Additionally, the author does not give the reader physical descriptions of the places and objects about which she writes. We read of automobiles, houses, farms, roads, etc. without having any description of how those things appear, smell, feel. This made reading the novel, especially the first two-thirds of it, at times boring and flat. With that said, the author, who is a relative of the Sparling family, does well at building a fictitious storyline around the basic historical facts of the account. It becomes readily apparent to the reader that Howard has done her research, genealogical and otherwise, in her preparation for telling her family’s fascinating story. I give this book 3 stars out of 5, and recommend it to anyone interested in historical fiction, especially those living in the Thumb of Michigan. You can purchase the book here.
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AuthorTy Perry is a writer and blogger living in metro Detroit. Archives
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