Try Dying (Ty Buchanan Series, Book 1)

Ty Buchanan's beloved fiancé has just died in a freak Hollywood style accident, instantly spinning his world off its axis. Maybe someday he'll recover. Maybe someday he'll make sense of his emotions and get on with his life without Jacquelyn. Only someday doesn't come, and Ty watches himself become a man he never dreamed he'd be. An attorney sworn to uphold the law, he's soon breaking it to find out the truth about Jacquelyn's death. Was it really accidental?

In the vein of Brandt Dodson's Colton Parker series, Try Dying is a no-nonsense crime novel with a legal bent rather than a private investigator or cop angle. Cinematic in feel due to Bell's expert use of snappy dialogue, there's also a nice peppering of movie references, no doubt coming straight from Bell's own love of classic films. Even Ty Buchanan is a namesake derived from characters in two movies, Tyler Durden in "Fight Club" (1999) and Tom Buchanan in "Buchanan Rides Alone" (1958).

In a recent interview Bell reveals: "I haven't been happy about some of the trends in contemporary, secular suspense. And I think the audience out there is getting tired of the gratuitous elements. I believe you can write page-turning suspense without that, like some of the great crime novels of the 40s and 50s. I wanted to offer that, because I see the need for it."

That's one of the great things about Try Dying. Life is painted in all its edgy glory, and the underbelly of LA is as much a character as Ty. Yet through it all Bell manages to show us this world without rolling us through the gutter. He's accomplished exactly what he set out to accomplish--to craft an action-laced thriller devoid of smut. Many an author has decided you can't portray life as it is without swearing, gore, and sex, but Jim proves you can. A very small quibble is I was a little confused a few times by the novel's extensive cast.

Even though Try Dying isn't Christian fiction per se, Jim freely portrays Biblical principles, such as forgiveness in a priest's heart even though he's paid a stiff price for a molestation he didn't commit. In some ways I found the Christian take-away value more poignant than you find in much of today's "Christian fiction". It's clear the priest and a basketball playing nun have a real relationship with Jesus, and they become Ty's confidants. Hopefully they'll be involved in the next Ty Buchanan novel, Try Darkness, and continue to shine light into Ty's world.

Truth is truth, and Bell makes sure to weave it through all of his books. Ty's journey is a harrowing one, filled with enough beatings, explosions, and bad guys to rival the best crime fiction has to offer, but morality isn't left in the dust. Try Dying is a dynamic start to a new series, filled with colorful characters and elaborate plots.

--Reviewed by C.J. Darlington for TitleTrakk

James Scott Bell's TRY DYING features young, hot-shot lawyer Ty Buchannon forced into a life or death struggle after his fiance tragically dies in a traffic accident. Or was it an accident? A gang-banger shoots his girlfriend then goes to a highway overpass where he kills himself. His dead body falls on an oncoming car, killing Ty's fiance. Or did it kill her? Maybe she was alive and then killed after the body fell into her car.

At his fiance's funeral, a homeless man confronts Ty to tell him his girlfiend might have been murdered. Then the homeless man knocks him out and robs him. Now Ty is obssessed with finding the truth. He starts out doing little things like contacting the police who investigated the accident and the attractive reporter who was on the scene. Ty begins to find answers and they lead him to Rudy Barocos, a self-help guru that specializes in showing former gangsters the straight and narrow. Ty is also working a high profile case of repressed memories and child abuse. Grief from his fiance's death has overwhelmed him and Ty is shocked at his own behavior and how far he will go to learn the truth.

This novel marks a departure for Bell, who has made a name for himself as a writer of legal inspirational thrillers. With TRY DYING, Bell has switched genres and publishers. Through Centerstreet publishing, he is writing a mainstream suspense novel that is gritty and supsensful but doesn't have all the bad language or extreme violence found in so many other novels today. This is not a Christian, or inspirational novel, but two of its supporting characters are a priest and a nun. You will find more spirituality in this novel than you will in most all other suspense novels. I applaud Bell for this new step in his career and can't wait for the next book in the series.

I enjoyed TRY DYING and believe Ty Buchannon is a great character with a lot of potential. This novel is told from a 1st person point of view, so the reader learns a lot about Ty and his view on the world. I found this novel to be missing strong secondary characters that are so common in other Bell novels. By writing fron Ty's POV, if he doesn't get close to a woman, then the readers don't either. This novel had a lot of potentially strong female characters, but none really stood out. Since this is a series, I see the potential for some strong relationships to develop in the next novel or two.

This is a great book to give to someone as a gift to interest them in Christian suspense fiction. I recommend it to all Bell fans as well.

TRY DYING (Legal Mys-Ty Buchanan-CA-Cont) - Poor
Bell, James Scott
Center Street, 2007, US Hardcover - ISBN: 1599956845

First Sentence: On a wet Tuesday morning in December, Ernesto Bonilla, twenty-eight, shot his twenty-three-year-old wife, Alejandra, in the backyard of their West Forty-fifth Street home in South Los Angeles.

Attorney Ty Buchanan is preparing a case involving repressed memories and child abuse. While deposing a witness, Bonilla, after killing his wife, drives to a freeway overpass, shots himself and falls off an overpass onto Buchanan's fiancée Jennifer's car, killing her. At the funeral, Ty is told Jennifer was alive but murdered before the emergency vehicles reached her. Jennifer's death is declared accidental; Ty is going to find out for sure.

Chapter One is a great hook and made me want to read the read the rest of the story. Unfortunately, Chapter One was, for me, the best thing about the book. It went downhill fast.

Portents--hate them, always have, always will. If the story is good, I'll keep reading. I don't need to be teased into it.

The plot is very contrived. No one will talk on the phone. It's always the "meet me at...." which leads to...the protagonist--TSTL (too stupid to live). Time after time, he puts himself into situations where he keeps getting beat up. The chapters are very short and choppy. The dialogue is very weak. The author tries to be either too clever or to "real" and neither succeeds. The women are all beautiful, including the basketball-playing nun named Sister Mary Veritas.

There is a good twist at the end but the reading was so painful, I almost didn't get there. I already have the next book in the series. This, and it, will be donated to my local library.

TRY DYING (Legal Mys-Ty Buchanan-CA-Cont) - Poor
Bell, James Scott
Center Street, 2007, US Hardcover - ISBN: 1599956845

First Sentence: On a wet Tuesday morning in December, Ernesto Bonilla, twenty-eight, shot his twenty-three-year-old wife, Alejandra, in the backyard of their West Forty-fifth Street home in South Los Angeles.

Attorney Ty Buchanan is preparing a case involving repressed memories and child abuse. While deposing a witness, Bonilla, after killing his wife, drives to a freeway overpass, shots himself and falls off an overpass onto Buchanan's fiancée Jennifer's car, killing her. At the funeral, Ty is told Jennifer was alive but murdered before the emergency vehicles reached her. Jennifer's death is declared accidental; Ty is going to find out for sure.

Chapter One is a great hook and made me want to read the read the rest of the story. Unfortunately, Chapter One was, for me, the best thing about the book. It went downhill fast.

Portents--hate them, always have, always will. If the story is good, I'll keep reading. I don't need to be teased into it.

The plot is very contrived. No one will talk on the phone. It's always the "meet me at...." which leads to...the protagonist--TSTL (too stupid to live). Time after time, he puts himself into situations where he keeps getting beat up. The chapters are very short and choppy. The dialogue is very weak. The author tries to be either too clever or to "real" and neither succeeds. The women are all beautiful, including the basketball-playing nun named Sister Mary Veritas.

There is a good twist at the end but the reading was so painful, I almost didn't get there. I already have the next book in the series. This, and it, will be donated to my local library.

James Scott Bell has used his legal background and his mastery of the craft of fiction to produce a novel that is comparable to those of Raymond Chandler. Attorney Ty Buchanan suffers the loss of his fiance, finds that her death was no accident, and is swept up into a maelstrom of mayhem that leaves the reader anxious to turn the pages. The last thirty pages have to be read at one sitting, even if it's after midnight.
I understand that the next Ty Buchanan book is already in the works. I can hardly wait.

Snap, crackle and pop. These are the sounds of James Scott Bell's latest novel, Try Dying. Tightly written prose wrapped around a to-die-for plot that has the reader turning pages faster than a race horse heading for the finish line. And never ever figure you know where the story is headed. The drama has more twists and turns than a roller coaster ride.

Bell's characacters jump off the pages with depth, humor and humanness--an attorney drawn to investigate a freak death like a moth drawn to a flame, a cloistered nun with a mean jump shot, and a priest who has learned to forgive from the heart. These characters come alive as the story unfolds in this fast-paced legal thriller.

It opens with a freak accident. A man falls from an overpass and slams into traffic below, killing school teacher Jacqueline Dwyer, protagonist Ty Buchanan's fiancée. The accident rips Buchanan from his comfortable world of civil litigation and dumps him onto the mean streets of Los Angeles as he searches for answers that may not exist. Buchanan's survival is brought into question as he sinks deeper and deeper into this black whole of mystery, murder and betrayal. The question becomes whether he will find the answer before death finds him. "I should have been more deferential, if I wanted to keep all my teeth. But there was river of ice in me all of a sudden. Like I'd used up all my fear." Buchanan pulls the reader across this precarious divide separating love and hate, and eventually life and death, where knowing the answer become more important than life itself.

It is James Scott Bell at his best.

Gritty. That was my first thought when I finished reading this book. The other was, wow this could totally be made into a movie. It reminded me very much of the movie Collateral starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. The way the setting was described along with the action sequences and just the mood in general made me feel like I was in a slow moving but suspenseful film noir. There's a lot of mystery and suspense in this book that keeps you guessing til the end. Things that appear to be unconnected somehow have a thread that ties everything together. I love all the characters in this novel especially the non traditional priest and the basketball playing nun. Really can't wait to read more about them. This is a book you could pass on to anybody who is a fan of the genre and they would not be disappointed. I would compare this book to be on par with John Grisham just without sex or cursing. Like I've said before it has been proven that you can write an excellent story without having to resort to filler material. There were several places in the story where I could see another author just throwing in a sex scene or placing a few f-bombs to add space. But the story does not need it at all. Instead what you get is action filled drama, several intense scenes of violence and a story that keeps you reading from page one. This book shows that Christian fiction is not just clean romance novels. I'm really looking forward to the next book in the series. Top notch writing, Mr. Bell, top notch.

In a nutshell Try Dying is a Harlan Coben knock-off ... on speed. Our hero Ty Buchanan, is an up and coming attorney in LA and a regular guy who quickly finds himself - within the first two pages - in a highly irregular situation when his fiancée is tragically killed when a man attempting suicide falls from an overpass onto said fiancée's car - killing her instantly. Is this just a bizarre accident? Or is there more here than meets the eye? Of course there is and Ty is going to do all he can to get to the bottom of it, even if it kills him, which it almost does more than several times.

Other reviewers have coined a term for protagonists such as Ty - TSTL - Too Stupid to Live. Ty is all this and more, blindly walking into one B-movie trap after another - usually involving a meeting with a stranger in a dark abandoned locale - and getting the snot beat out of him - about every 40 pages.

Every trick in the book - pun intended - is used to keep the reader flipping pages without thinking. There are 120+ short chapters and a multitude of unrelated plots - an interesting repressed memory case Ty is litigating with competing psychiatrists, counterfeiters, drug smuggling, federal agents, gang bangers, and the Catholic Church - which all tie together in a not so believable ending.

Try Dying is mindless entertainment. Quickly read and then quickly forgotten.

A bizarre series of events have culminated in the death of a 27-year-old elementary school teacher on an LA freeway: A man has shot his wife, then shot himself on a freeway overpass, falling over onto a car driven by Jacqueline Dwyer, who was killed. Her fiancé, Ty Buchanan, a 34-year-old trial attorney, is devastated and completely bereft. And then, at her funeral, shockingly, a stranger approaches Ty and tells him that his fiancée was murdered.

Professionally, Ty has been handling a huge case for his firm: He is defending Dr. Lea Edwards in a $10,000,000 lawsuit that has been brought against her for libel, invasion of privacy, and harassment arising out of an incident of repressed memory, that of the plaintiff in the case. In the opening pages of the book, looking back at the time after the funeral of his fiancée and the confrontation which took place there, the author, through Ty, queries: "How does a hot young lawyer on the rise, a guy with a future draped with Brioni, go from the twentieth floor to the county jail? How does a guy become something he's never been, more animal than man, able to and wanting to hurt people? Kill people? How does he go from light to darkness as fast as you can flip a switch in a mortuary basement?" But all that is precisely what transpires from that point forward, as his life spins completely out of control.

When things seem like they can't get worse for Ty, they do. There is another dead body, this one unquestionably a murder, and Ty is a suspect. At the same time, he seems to be attracting muscular types intent on inflicting major harm to him. The author at times uses somewhat overblown dialogue, e.g., "What blazed out clear were her acetylene-blue eyes," and "Her red lips parted like flower petals opening to the sun," and credulity is stretched a bit at the denouement, but the tale is a good one, and the novel was fast and interesting. I especially enjoyed the character of the nun who is a whiz on the basketball court, who becomes Ty's ally. In all, this was a pleasurable read.

I have read and enjoyed a number of James Scott Bell books, but this is my favorite so far. I loved the "film noir" feel of the book, and the Hollywood setting came alive to me, making feel as if I were right there with the protagonist. I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series.