Well, the story is all there in Metzger's new novel, "Between Rock And Hard Places: A Mike McMahon Mystery" ($15 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing, heidelberggraphics.com/Stansbury%20Publishing/between_rock_ord.htm; also for Amazon Kindle).
McMahon remembers; after all, aside from being a private investigator, these days he teaches rock 'n' roll history at Marin Community College. He has an on-again, off-again relationship with Becka Goldberg, who teaches Anglo-Saxon lit at SF State, and he is apt to evidence his love of wordplay at inappropriate times, but otherwise he is busy narrating the novel, minding his own business (actually, his job is minding other people's business, but that is to get ahead of ourselves), when Jimmy Rooney's recent widow pays him a visit.
Jimmy was the band's drummer; he'd been working on a tell-all book about the group when, on his way to deliver the finished manuscript to the post office, he suffered a cardiac arrest and drove off a cliff and died. Authorities chalked it up as an accident, but Sarah Rooney, now in her mid-sixties, is convinced it was murder. After all, Jimmy's office computer, with an electronic copy, had been stolen.
What was in that book?
What follows is McMahon's unraveling of what turns out to be a twisted plot stretching all the way back to the band's demise when Johnny is killed in a plane crash on July 16, 1976 after a concert that very night. Along the way we observe McMahon's penchant for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, his meeting with others associated with the band and its money, and the threat to his own life.
The fun never ends, especially with a narrator who uses "lots of sentence fragments. Effectively. If sometimes unnecessarily."
It's necessary. Summer. Reading.
