Wahoo Rhapsody, by Shaun Morey ($13.95)

It's difficult to be a new author these days, and while Shaun Morey is not a "new" author, having written a nonfiction book about fishing, he and several other writers have had to be creative in getting their fiction published.

Amazon Encore, an imprint of mega-entity Amazon.com, is sending four authors to Murder by the Book on August 7. While their books are primarily being downloaded in digital format, the authors and Amazon Encore are committed to print versions as well. In another day and age -- actually, not too long ago -- Shaun and the others would have had no problem being published by one of the major book companies. In that not-so-long-ago age book publishers were many. Now they have all been joined into a small collection of super-corporations. Small imprints have popped up to handle the books the super-corps aren't looking at, but most of those imprints are struggling with name recognition and consistency of quality.

What Shaun has written is a goofy, clever, Carl Hiaasen-ish book. Francis Finch, a U.S. lawyer has sued God and won -- I won't spoil the surprise; you have to read the book to find out what that's about. To escape the faithful bent on revenge, Finch has moved to Mexico and changed his name to Atticus Fish. In order to save a friend, a fishing boat captain, and his crew from becoming victims of a drug lord, Atticus wends his way through various bizarre situations to save them. Even the bad guys are not without a sense of humor, or at least meet their end in darkly humorous ways.

Yay! to Amazon Encore for bringing "Wahoo Rhapsody" to our part of the print world, and yay! to Shaun for giving us a chuckle in a sometimes bleak and cloudy world.

My last words: If this review makes you want to read this book, do us a favor and order a print copy from Murder by the Book (books@mbtb.com). It is totally possible to support both MBTB and Amazon!