The Prince of Cleveland

David W. Stephens
iUniverse (2008)
ISBN 9780595527731
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (2/09) 

I really wanted to like “The Prince of Cleveland” by David W. Stephens. The premise of it is great – we meet a good guy who happens to win a fortune and does his best to do the right thing with it, but then dark forces interfere. In such a story, one loves to root for the hero as a rule, yet I felt curiously unable to.

Let me first return to the plot and outline it briefly. Thomas Murphy, your average-Joe guy, is blessed by a one-hundred-million-dollars lottery win. He decides that the best way to spend this money would be to clean the streets of Cleveland and, after employing over two thousand workers, he starts picking the trash and gets the job done to perfection. He becomes much loved by the Cleveland citizens, who even appoint him the Prince of Cleveland. But then the trouble starts – he is being haunted by the echoes of a prophetic dream he had the night after winning the lottery, in which he heard a raspy voice repeating, “For you, we are coming.” He and his family are kidnapped by Lucas Krueger, a ruthless criminal, who lets Thomas go, but keeps his wife and three kids, demanding a thirty-million-dollar ransom. The FBI is called in, but they bumble and stumble and fail to retrieve the Murphy family, so Thomas Murphy decides to take matters into his own hands.

So what is the problem here?  While the writing in “The Prince of Cleveland” in itself is rather awkward and not too sparkling, that would still be acceptable if the reader could feel more connected to the characters, yet the author, in my opinion, failed to create the necessary bond. We learn the height and the weight of most characters, yet we learn very little about what makes them tick. I felt emotionally utterly detached from the hero and mostly unconcerned about the rest of the characters. I also failed to understand why would anybody who feels so imminently threatened decide to postpone putting the security in place, even if only for one day? While the book pretty much promised a sequel in the closing chapter, I do not plan to pick it up.

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