Book Review: More Tomasewski
More Tomasewski. Del Staecker. Musa Publishing, Colorado Springs, CO, January 1, 2014, Kindle e-book, 185 pages.
Reviewed by Kent McDaniel.
More Tomasewski is a series of stories involving Jake Thompson, a.k.a. Jan Tomasewski, and the stories are great fun. Jake is good at catching crooks and bad at respecting authority, and it’s his lack of respect that got him exiled to the despised Administrative Investigations Unit (AIU) and forced out of the Chicago Police Department. Now he subsists on a meager pension and sleeps in a storage room of a Southside greasy spoon. His fondness for Old Jimmy Jack—a mix of Old Granddad, Jim Beam, and Jack Daniels—adds to his problems. If that’s not enough, the diner’s waitress, Earline, is bent on corralling him into an unwanted relationship.
On top of all of that, Lt. Mildred Foister, his former boss at AIU, calls him in for a sit-down one morning. She tells Jake that a clerical error, encountered when his father changed their family name from Tomasewski, has jeopardized Jake’s pension. Officially, he’s no longer retired and needs to start showing up for work again at AUI. He also owes the city for the pension checks he had received.
He returns to the diner, where his friend Dewey gives him some more news. Two days ago, one of their boyhood pals disappeared after winning four hundred thousand dollars at a slot machine over in Indiana. Immediately, Jake is enmeshed in police department politics and the underside of Midwestern casinos, not to mention a murder frame up. The story takes him across the Southside and its near suburbs. These settings ring true, and the same goes for the tale’s characters. The plot whisks the characters through increasingly complex twists until it culminates in an understated bittersweet ending.
Jake gets mixed up with a Southside urban legend, Resurrection Mary. The story may or may not feature the supernatural—you can decide—but definitely puts Jake through some intense changes, providing good, creepy fun. As Jake recovers from his challenges, his one time partner in crime fighting, Eddie Moocha, a.k.a. The Duct Tape Vigilante, comes to Jake for help. Eddie has retired from his career as a low-budget Batman, and he’s facing legal trouble over his new undercover crime-fighting project.
On Eddie’s behalf, Jake goes to a Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff at the Cook County D.A.’s office. The Deputy Assistant agrees to help Eddie only if Jake can solve two, tough, semi-cold cases for her. The first case centers on Internet blackmail and the second revolves around the murder of the owner of a string of Southside pizza parlors. Both cases lead to plot twists in spades, encounters with shady individuals, and trips into Chicago’s dark side.
Interspersed with all these tales are several shorter pieces that change the pace and reveal surprising aspects of various characters. Although the narratives also vary in tone and style, they do work together to form a larger whole. The Chicago settings are one unifying thread, as are recurring characters and Jake’s propensity for helping a friend.
But even more, the consistency of Jake’s voice as narrator unites the stories. It’s the wise-ass voice of a guy who cares about justice more than laws, hates seeing a friend shafted, and thinks of those traits as major character flaws. The voice was my favorite part of More Tomasewski, which is saying a lot because I enjoyed its characters, settings, and plots big-time.