Ty Scarlet by Joe Camborne

“If you’re a fan of classic case-cracking mysteries and the Avengers, this book should pique your interest.”

Review by Rayleigh Setser

A newly found body. Possible cult connections. A wasps’ nest of family secrets.

Suspend your disbelief for TY SCARLET: a fast-paced, cinematic mystery tinged with noir, and loaded with spectacular twists, an unreliable narrator, and a glint of the cosmic.

Ty Scarlet was once a high-flying lawyer, but ever since a series of catastrophic events changed his life forever, Scarlet’s been a recovering lawyer, adrift. For the last 20 years.

It is baffling, then, that while on an airport layover, he gets pulled aside by someone influential from his past, who begs him to investigate their daughter’s unsolved disappearance. Scarlet’s no detective, but he’ll take the job, mainly to uncover why they came to him at all.

The two-year-old Emma Harwood case not only strikes a personal chord with Scarlet, but every question he asks leads him to feel that he has inexplicably mastered an incredible new suite of skills that gets him closer and closer to finding out what happened to Emma.

Is his luck finally turning, or are things feeling just a little…off?

Scarlet would do well to keep an open mind while investigating Emma’s disappearance because it will call into question everything he thought he knew about his place and purpose in the universe–and beyond.

TY SCARLET is a bracing, wildly satisfying page-turner that won’t let go until it unravels all of the cosmos’ secrets for you.

Ty Scarlet caused me to throw my "responsible reader" persona to the wind as I chose to forsake sleep on a work night in order to binge this book in almost one sitting. Even now, I need sleep about as much as Ty does, but you're going to get a sleep-deprived, caffeinated review instead.

Everything about this book was just plain fun! I gut-laughed at the tongue-in-cheek humor. I gasped in shock at every plot twist and, on multiple occasions, concerned my husband with passionate outbursts. I lived this story with Ty and will now have delusions of having a friend named "Ty Scarlet".

This book ("book": a generic statement that just doesn't seem to describe my recent experience) is about as far from what I expected as Pluto (which IS a planet, by the way. I learned the song in grade school) is from the sun. I expected a Perry Mason type of plot going into it, and what I got was a (younger) Walt Longmire-ish character thrown into a convoluted Perry Mason case with astronomical twists. Bordering on the ridiculous, I couldn't guess where anything was going, yet it was so brilliantly executed that I questioned my own sleuthing logic on so many occasions. Especially when Ty broke the 4th wall and addressed my concerns as if he'd seen my eye-roll or heard my exclamation of "Wait. What?".

One of my favorite parts of reading is getting to know the author through their writing and when I tell you that this is so excellently written that I forgot that Ty, himself, wasn't the author (though I'm not entirely convinced that they aren't the same person), I'm not exaggerating. The many (many, many) pop culture and literary references made this book feel so incredibly real (I dang near passed away when Ty made a Carmen Sandiego reference; those games had me in a CHOKE-HOLD as a kid and the greatest thief of all time is probably to blame for my obsession with noir). I didn't want to miss a single line of this book; so much so that I often back-tracked and re-read lines, highlighting them and even reading them aloud to my husband.

All that said, this book fluidly weaves in and out of the genres of Mystery and Science Fiction so seamlessly that when you're reading about the case, you forget that there are hints of science fiction until Ty reminds you. If you're a fan of classic case-cracking mysteries and the Avengers, this book should pique your interest. I had way too much fun with this book and I sincerely hope Ty Scarlet will become a series that will have as many books as Perry Mason so that I can forever binge them.

Content Ratings:

6. Strong action and gore (most action sequences describes blood loss and the injury to a clear picture, albeit brief or infrequent scenes),

2. Romance with mild content (holding hands and mild kissing).

7. Intense cursing (all words used frequently).

Other Trigger/Content Notices:

Content disclaimers: No on-page romantic scenes (only implied “good nights”), though there are plenty of out-of-pocket comments and extremely brief descriptions of blackmail photos and videos. Action/Gore: several descriptions of the crime, albeit brief, and nothing I haven’t come to expect from mysteries. Cursing/Vulgarity: Lots of cursing and f-bombs would make this a rated R movie. The heated conversations, regarding infidelity, lead to some vulgar lines and insults.

Our Reviews of Other Books by these authors:

N/A