Speer Morgan's latest novel, The Freshour Cylinders, is an engaging combination of edge-of-your-seat mystery and historical drama. The novel is set in 1930s Arkansas and Oklahoma and traces the tribulations of Tom Freshour (who some may remember as the strong and silent orphan from The Whipping Boy) as he tries to discover why people who are involved with a local Indian burial mound are turning up dead. Morgan's characters, from the dashing Tom to the sexy Rainy to the contrary office typewriter which has a habit of jumping off the desk, are so lovingly detailed that they are often simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. It is this wealth of engaging characters as much as the twists and turns of the plot that will keep you reading.

Tom Freshour is still as strong and stoic as he was in The Whipping Boy but has gained that wry recklessness that turns action heros into legends. His steamy romance with Rainy and his forays into the mystery that involves both of them resurrect old ghosts so that Tom is not only forced to play detective but must also confront questions about his own heritage. As the mystery barrels along, Morgan manages to infuse the novel with a good dose of fascinating history and intriguing psychological conflict. This is a beautifully written story of a man struggling with issues that have violently leapt from the personal to the political while navigating the astonishing events that are piling up around him. You won't be able to put this book down.

What a fine book The Freshour Cylinders is! It was the kind of reading experience that peopled my daydreams and nightdreams with vivid characters in exquisite detail. I felt like a time-traveller, transported to an exotic location, immersed in a time and place that, before this book, had little clarity to me. I have nothing but praise for this book -- it was thoroughly enjoyable and having to put it down put me in a bad mood. It's a book to savor for its splendid characters, dead-on dialogue, cinemascope descriptions of place and atmosphere, and driving plot. It's the kind of unbelieveable story that becomes completely believeable in the expert telling. I couldn't predict where I was being taken, like being driven through the Winding Stair Mountains in heavy fog, and I was thankful that a writer with unerring skill was at the wheel. Speer Morgan has an unfailing and incredible sense of historical accuracy. I was completely convinced that these characters were real. In addition to the pleasures of pure storytelling and exotic place, Freshour provided an even deeper satisfaction. It's such a powerful and harrowing book about the past: about the way our cultural past affects us collectively and the way we are each affected by our individual past. Tom Freshour, being half white, half Indian, is such a good character for this unfolding. And what a stunning indictment of white greed and American justice!

Speer Morgan's latest novel, The Freshour Cylinders is the most captivating book I've read in a long time. It's an edge-of-your-seat mystery that includes a steamy romance and a great deal of fascinating history. All of the characters, from the protagonist, Tom Freshour (who some may remember as the strong silent orphan in The Whipping Boy) to the malfunctioning typewriter with a propensity for throwing itself off the desk are so skillfully detailed that they are simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking.

Tom Freshour is still strong and somewhat stoic in this book but has acquired an edge of that wry recklessness that tranforms action hero into legend. In this intriguing account of a newly discovered Indian burial mound and the murders that surround it, Morgan plunges us into the gripping history of 1930's Arkansas and Oklahoma and the drama of Freshour's own struggles with old ghosts and new challenges. Beyond the pleasure of a smart mystery, The Freshour Cylinders offers a moving story a man dealing with problems that span the personal and the political. You won't be able to put it down!

The careful reader of the Whipping Boy will note that Morgan accepts few of the stereotypes of the southwestern frontier. For example, Hanging Judge Parker has become a symbol to liberals of the mindlessly violent injustice of frontier justice, especially as by the 1880s Federal officials began working to undermine Parker's authority;Morgan reveals that Federal officials chiefly opposed Parker because he strictly enfoced the law to protect the Indians in what is now Oklahoma from both marauding criminal whites and from the Federal government itself that coveted their land and eventually would strip the Nations of their final sovereignty. The novel's time period is 1894, after the great land rush and when a combination of Federal officials and northeastern businessmen with experience in coal and oil began furtively plotting to destroy the Nations and create a larger Oklahoma ruled for and by the interests of those businessmen and their government allies, using white farmers as pawns to weaken the Indian Nations and to convince the American populace this was for the good of the USA as a whole - the same argument that propped the removal of the 5 Tribes from the southeast to what would be eastern Oklahoma.

Morgan didn't need the graphic sex scenes, and his presentation of the Presbyterian pastor who runs the orphanage for Indian boys is the one stock character living up to stereotypes. But The Whipping Boy is a better novel, in some ways vastly so, than the recent bestselling Toni Morrison work also set in Oklahoma, Paradise.

This book did not live up to my expectations. I found that it did not have any of the nursing diagnoses that I was looking for. I constantly had to turn to my adult care plan book in order to make a proper care plan. Don't waste your money on this book.