April Evil

Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc.. Very Good. 1956. Early printing. Paperback. This is a mass market paperback book. The book is in Very Good condition and was issued without a dust jacket. This is an early printing, with code: T2224 on the cover. There is some light bumping and rubbing to the spine ends and corners of the book covers. The spine of the book has some light creasing. The text pages are clean, but starting to tone. "Reading it again was pure joy and it's nice to report that the novel holds up well. MacDonald returns to his third-person, multi-perspective template after stumbling slightly with You Live Once, and here he writes a much tighter plot, with a focused narrative that moves along quickly. It's a bit of a preview of his 1958 novel The Executioners, in that he begins with a peaceful, unsuspecting and unprepared setting and introduces evil into it. He also presages that novel with one of the characters, a bad guy named Ronnie Crown, who is one of a long line of soulless MacDonald villains that would reach its apogee with Max Cady. But what makes April Evil really interesting is MacDonald's attempt to write a novel with no real hero in it. The author uses attorney Ben Piersall as a kind of narrative anchor, but Ben does nothing heroic and seems more of an observer in the plot. And out of all of the main characters featured in the book he probably gets the least amount of face time." (from the Trap of Solid Gold website) .