Blackman’s Coffin: A Sam Blackman Mystery

Mark de Castrique
Poisoned Pen Press (2008)
ISBN 9781590585177
Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (6/08)


Sam Blackman has just returned from Iraq, minus his leg.  Not taking kindly to his public criticism of the military’s inadequate care of their solders, he finds himself in a Veteran’s Hospital in rural North Carolina.  Having to deal with the loss of his leg, his career, and the recent death of his parents weighs heavily on him.  An unexpected visitor, who is an amputee herself, pays him a visit one day.  She helps snap him out of his self-pity and gets him motivated to start doing something else.  She suggests that he can put his investigative skills to use working for her private security firm. 

Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen because she is murdered.  Knowing that she had made a connection with him, her sister, Nakayla tracks him down and shows him an eighty-eight year old journal that she found in her sister’s apartment.  Since the journal appeared to have been disguised, she suspects that it holds a role in her sister’s death.  Sam reads the journal and discovers that it was written by a twelve-year-old boy, who was also an amputee.  It also covers an incident in which his father, who was white, helped a black man, to whom the family felt indebted, transport a relative’s coffin from their home to Georgia. 

Sam wants to help Nakayla solve her sister’s murder.  This is where the adventure begins.  They discover that there are people from the present who will do anything to keep this murder from being solved.  They also have to interview people who had a connection with her sister.  This includes the eccentric residents who reside in the apartments where she lived.  This place is commonly referred to as “The Lunatic Asylum.”  Keeping themselves alive and trying to solve the murder help bring Sam back into who he was before his injury.

“Blackman’s Coffin” is a wonderful mystery.  The author takes you back and forth in time as he tells the tale from 1919 and the story in the present.  His rich descriptions of the places that are involved with the plot help bring the story to life.  The interactions between the characters range from being heartwarming to intriguing.  The ending was one in which I was left surprised at the end.  I liked that I wasn’t able to guess it ahead of time.  I was kept in suspense.  In addition to being a great adventure and mystery, I was also left with the message that we should enjoy our life as it is presented to us and that we shouldn’t waste time.  To quote a one-hundred-and-one-year-old character, “Time is a gift from God.”  You should definitely take the time to read “Blackman’s Coffin.”

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