Intro, or the Stuff Before the Book is Opened
Scareway to Heaven: Murder at the Fillmore East, the sixth book in the Rock & Roll Murders, was published in 2014, according to the copyright page. Amazon.com lists the publication date as October 27, 2014, and this book again doesn’t have the ISBN number listed except for in the bar bode. This was almost two years after the publication of the previous book in the series, Go Ask Malice: Murder at Woodstock. Between that book and this one, she published the books Rock Chick: A Girl and Her Music: The Jazz & Pop Writings, 1968-1971, on July 11, 2013, and Tales of Spiral Castle: Stories of the Keltiad, on June 19, 2014. Son of the Northern Star, her historical novel about Guthrum the Dane, was listed in the Also By page of the last book as coming out in 2013. The Also By page in this book just lists the book title without indication that it’s forthcoming or when it might be published, which implies the book is already published. That particular book never was published.
On the Also By page, the author lists herself as Patricia Kennealy Morrison, and the Keltiad books are listed first, under the heading “The Books of the Keltiad.” There are now eight books in this series, as Tales of Spiral Castle was the last Keltiad book. The Beltain Queen and The Cloak of Gold exist, if at all, in only fragmentary, unpublished form.
Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison is listed after the Keltiad, then ROCK CHICK: A Girl and Her Music: The Jazz & Pop Writings 1968-1971 (the all-caps is an interesting choice), and then Son of the Northern Star.
And after that comes The Rock & Roll Murders: The Rennie Stride Mysteries. All books in the series are listed, including the last published book in the series, Daydream Bereaver, which is listed as forthcoming, with no specific publication date.
The title of this book is a twist on the title of the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven,” which strikes me as odd since there seems to have been some one-sided bad blood between Patricia Kennealy-Morrison and Robert Plant, according to a story in her interview in the book Rock Wives. Plus, the song wouldn’t be released for another two years.
The Psychedelic Art lettering and the Blood Guitar, the two consistent motifs of the series covers, are both back. This time the title, subtitle, and author name are in the upper left-hand corner, with the title in violet, the lines between the title and subtitle and subtitle and author name in teal-green, the subtitle in yellow-green, and the author name in a darker lavender than the series title and subtitle at the bottom of the page.
The central image of the cover is the marquee of the Fillmore East, with the façade of the building itself only solid-looking and detailed where the light from the marquee strikes it. Otherwise, the building is insubstantial and sketched in. A group of gray and black silhouettes of people are clustered around what we can only assume is the front entrance to the building, beneath the marquee. A row of tiny lit bulbs is at the bottom of the marquee and the Blood Guitar mimics the vertical lines of the marquee: the top of the guitar is at the top of the sign and the body of the guitar is at the bottom of the marquee. The Blood Guitar is not done as well on this cover; I can tell it’s a Fender Stratocaster, but the actual shape of the guitar is warped. It also drips onto the pavement but none of the silhouettes notice.
This is the weakest cover of the series, as far as I’m concerned. Visually, it’s uninteresting as the only colors used on the cover, aside from the Blood Guitar and the title, subtitle, and author name, are variations on black, white, and a blue-toned dark gray. The book is set in winter, so the artist is probably trying for a cold feel, but interesting things can be done with a limited color palette. This isn’t it.
I’d rank the book covers as follows, from worst to best.
- Scareway to Heaven
- Love Him Madly
- Go Ask Malice
- Ungrateful Dead
- California Screamin’
- A Hard Slay’s Night
Patterns with the covers are becoming clear enough for me to predict what would have been done with the cover for Ruby Gruesday: Murder on the Rock Limited. The first two books of the series had blue as a background color and an object as the central image. The next two books had brown as a background color and used interior settings with a central object. The next two books had outdoor settings with a multicolored background for one and a monotone background for the other and a vertical central image located at the right-hand edge of the cover. The first three covers did not have people; the next three covers do. Since I haven’t done Daydream Bereaver yet, which would be both the first book in a new two-grouping and a new three grouping, I’ll hold my thoughts about Ruby Gruesday’s possible cover.
Something different on the back cover: there’s a little wrought-iron fence with a gate, which I can only assume is the gate to the cemetery which will be mentioned in the back cover text.
As always, the back cover text starts out with a variation on a well-known Timothy Leary saying: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead…”
Reporter Rennie Stride and her superstar guitar-stud and part-time aristocrat fiancé, Turk Wayland—
Too many descriptors for Turk here. And how can you be a part-time aristocrat? That’s like being a part-time Caucasian. You either are or you aren’t. And the writer overused the word “superstar” in the last book to the point where it looks like poison ivy to me.
–have settled down in a historic brownstone in New York’s East Village…
Uh, no. We were told at the start of the last book that the Rennieturk liked this brownstone, but Turk wanted to flex on what a big…fortune he has, so he bought two other brownstones on either side of the one they wanted because it wasn’t big enough. And if this was a historic home, wouldn’t they have had to get permission to make changes to it? By “historic” I have to assume it was designated a historic landmark, which would have put the kibosh on the whole renovation enterprise.
…following Turk’s band Lionheart’s…
That’s a remarkably awkward phrasing, but she does those sometimes.
…epic tour closer—a shockingly spectacular four-hour Madison Square Garden concert.
Man, I hope that Madison Square Garden concert doesn’t take up the first four chapters of the book. But I guess Kennealy-Morrison had to make up for giving Lionheart a bad performance at Woodstock in the last book, as he’s the “co-protagonist” of the series. Despite being sidelined for most of the last book.
Even more shocking…
That’s an awkward segue there, but please continue.
…two dead people in a snow-filled cemetery, and they didn’t end up there the way you’d think.
What, you mean they didn’t die? Then how are they dead? And I don’t like the use of “you” here. It seems too conversational.
More shocking still:
Lionheart’s lead singer, Niles Clay, comes pounding on Rennie and Turk’s door the day after the Garden concert, confessing that he may have been the one who killed them.
This in itself indicates that Niles isn’t the killer, despite the fact that Rennie hates him more than Marjorie Lacing, her possibly ex-mother-in-law—no word on where the divorce, oh pardon me, the groundless annulment, is—and I would think he’d get killed so Rennie can be the lead singer for Lionheart and get all the attention, forever and ever, amen, but somehow that’s not going to happen. And he hasn’t confessed to anything—he’s just told them he might have killed them. In other words, he doesn’t know.
Nothing new, for Murder Chick…
For somebody who took offense on the regular at being called Murder Chick, she’s adopted it with gusto to show her essential specialness and superiority.
So Rennie’s task, at Turk’s desperate behest…
I love this—it proves that, if left to her own devices, Niles Clay would fry in the electric chair at Sing-Sing while she roasted marshmallows on his smoldering corpse.
…is to prove Niles didn’t do it.
Really, though, isn’t investigating a murder the job of the police? But there I go with my pesky logic again. When will I learn?
Though since the two loathe, detest, hate and despise each other…
All four of those words mean the same general thing, but why use one word when four will do?
…that may be more of a problem than any of them thinks…
So she can only prove someone didn’t commit murder if she likes them? Looking back on the rest of the series…
The canned bio is the same as the one on the back of the fifth book, and the author photograph is the same. The interesting bio was on the back of Rock Chick, where the author was called a “Celtic priestess,” which doesn’t mean anything. Celtic isn’t a religion. She stopped called herself a witch, never called herself a Wiccan, and seems to have stopped calling herself a Pagan by this point, so I don’t know where she is religion-wise here. The portrayal of Rennie seems to indicate she may have returned to Catholicism, but I have no proof of this so take it with a grain of salt.
While I was looking for the publication date of this book, I went over to Amazon.com and found her author page. Here she is listed as “Chevaliere the Rev. Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, DTJ” and gives Jim Morrison (called here “her husband” without any caveats or addendums) credit for her writing fiction, as he “encouraged” it. That’s not the way she portrayed it in her memoir, but whatever.
The songs that bookend the book are “Walking with Tigers” and “Steel Roses,” both of which are far too long to get radio airplay in the Sixties, as is traditional for the songs that the author writes.
Next time, the prologue, in which we get a description of the Fillmore East, meet Bill Graham in passing, some local color, and a mini-summary of the murders. Cool, last time she forgot the murder info in the prologue.
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