“Paladin” is the fifth story I have read from the short story anthology Playing Games, edited by Lawrence Block. The theme of this anthology is games and gaming. The story is set in 1985 and has connections to the tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, which was first published in 1974.
A man out on a boat with a coast guard rescue crew calls the sheriff of Granite City, a town off the southern coast of Washington. They are close friends and he asks the sheriff to look in on his son, a 12-year-old, who is alone at home. What the sheriff finds is a bloody crime scene, but the boy is not there. On the same day, the crew of the coast guard boat that the father went out on is lost at sea.
This was a very good story, well-written; it kept me interested from beginning to end. It was not really gory but the main crime scene, and other evidence found in the days following, was horrendous, although not lingered over. The crime is not solved.
The story is about 25 pages long and a lot was packed into it. I continued to think about it for the next few days, trying to decide what could have happened. It was a disturbing and haunting story.
Tod Goldberg has written eleven novels, including five novels based on the Burn Notice TV series, and three collections of short stories. I would be interested in reading his latest series. The first book is Gangsterland, but it might be too violent for me.
I read the first four stories in this anthology in July of this year and discussed them here.
Also see reviews at Book Chase and GeorgeKelley.org.
