{"id":5531,"date":"2026-08-06T01:00:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T01:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5531"},"modified":"2026-08-06T14:19:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T14:19:44","slug":"the-longest-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=5531","title":{"rendered":"The Longest Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><strong>Book of the Week August 6, 2026<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Canadian author Jagernauth&#8217;s noir debut is tense, smoky and full of &#8217;50s pulp language that entertains as well as grounds this tale of strangers to lovers who take on a heist, hoping to free themselves from small towns and small minds. No one has ever been caught skimming the till at Eddy &#038; Dowd Safe Deposit Company, and no one seems to notice the small tokens Richard has taken while employed there. Dowd knows he&#8217;s sitting on a fortune\u2014everyone in town stashes their treasured belongings there for safekeeping\u2014and three missed payments mean those sparkly and rare items become his. When charismatic and handsome Marlon sweeps into town and takes a position at Eddy &#038; Dowd, Richard allows himself to dream about a life with Marlon, anywhere other than sleepy Riverton. A plan forms: bag some goods from the Eddy &#038; Dowd vault, fence them, and split town as fast as they can. Office glamor girl and recent divorcee Gloria inserts herself, seeking her own kind of freedom. When private detective and disgraced cop Todd puts things together, the noose begins to tighten around the trio, with tragic results. <strong>Provocative and gritty, evocative of Highsmith and Chandler, this is a genre revival I can get behind<\/strong><em><strong>.<\/strong>\u2014Dodie Ownes<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book of the Week August 6, 2026 Canadian author Jagernauth&#8217;s noir debut is tense, smoky and full of &#8217;50s pulp language that entertains as well as grounds this tale of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":5530,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[163,180,92,69,78],"class_list":["post-5531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-book-of-the-week","tag-debut","tag-gay","tag-lgbtq","tag-noir"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Long-400x400.jpeg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Long.jpeg","author_info":{"display_name":"Dodie Ownes","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=15"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5531"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5548,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5531\/revisions\/5548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}