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Flight Dreams (The Mark Manning Mysteries Book 1) Kindle Edition
Investigative journalist Mark Manning is on the trail of a story that could make his career. Airline heiress Helena Carter, who vanished seven years ago, is about to be declared legally dead. Her fortune, valued at over one hundred million dollars, will go to the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and the Federated Cat Clubs of America. Manning is the only one who believes that the missing Chicago socialite is still alive. And he’s just been given an ultimatum by his publisher: Prove it, or he’s history. Determined to keep his job—and hoping to secure the five-hundred-thousand-dollar reward from Carter’s estate, as well as the coveted Partridge Prize for investigative journalism—Manning enters a world of religious fanatics who could turn back the clock on gay rights. At the same time, Manning grapples with his own sexuality as he falls in love for the first time—with the man of his dreams. Flight Dreams is the first book in Michael Craft’s Mark Manning series, which continues with Eye Contact and Body Language.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media
- Publication dateJuly 23, 2013
- File size1684 KB
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Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product details
- ASIN : B00D8Q5D4Q
- Publisher : Open Road Media (July 23, 2013)
- Publication date : July 23, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 1684 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 348 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #490,948 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #150 in LGBTQ+ Thrillers
- #786 in LGBTQ+ Mystery (Kindle Store)
- #2,859 in Gay & Lesbian (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Michael Craft is the author of 19 published novels, four of which have been honored as finalists for Lambda Literary Awards. His 2019 mystery, "ChoirMaster," was a Gold Winner of the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, and the first installment of his Dante & Jazz series, "Desert Getaway," was a 2023 Edgar Awards nominee for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award. Craft grew up in Illinois and spent his middle years in Wisconsin, which inspired the fictitious small-town setting of Dumont, used in several of his past books. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and now lives in Rancho Mirage, California, near Palm Springs, which provides the setting for his Dante & Jazz mystery series. In 2017, Michael Craft's professional archives were acquired by the Special Collections Department of the Rivera Library at the University of California, Riverside. Visit the author’s website at www.michaelcraft.com.
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By Michael Craft
4 stars
“Flight Dreams,” the first of Michael Craft’s Mark Manning Mysteries was published in 1997, which is antique—last century!—in this online book review world.
But Craft’s husband is a Facebook, and when he realized that I review lots of books, he asked if I knew Michael’s books.
I’ll jump at any excuse to read something new, and especially a genre I have loved since Joseph Hansen caught my imagination in the 1970s. I focus on gay lit in my recreational reading for a reason, and a lot of that stems from how important his kind of writing was to me as a newly-out student in the 1970s. Craft, when I friended him, worried that I’d be harsh on this, his first mystery novel.
I love it when people are afraid of me. It’s so ridiculous.
This book is flawed, for sure. But it deserves four stars in spite of its flaws. I have already bought the second volume in the series, “Body Language,” because I was anxious to see what would happen next. If I want to keep reading when I’m done, it’s a good thing.
Craft is a stylish, literate writer, salting his prose with wry elegance such as this:
“The lady with the novel flaps a silk fan. She is the only one present to take action against the heat; the others suffer passively, racking up purgatorial credits in some celestial ledger.”
The mystery, focused on the disappearance seven years previously of Helena Carter, a Chicago airline heiress, is engaging enough, if a little contrived. Through Mark Manning’s investigation—made under some urgency over his career and his reputation—Craft allows us to meet all of the players, past and present, in Mrs. Carter’s life. We are given, bit by bit, a complex backstory that offers a broad landscape of incident and psychological detail. There is a sort of weird stylistic thing, using the present tense in the first person. I got used to it, but it’s not the most comfortable narrative style for me.
My biggest problem with the book, for at least 60 per cent of it, anyway, was Mark himself. I got over it, eventually, but not without a good deal of discomfort about his character. Mark is 39, handsome, and really really well built (Craft rather overemphasizes that he doesn’t LOOK nearly forty, which for someone my age is really really tiresome. And don’t get me started on the 56-year-old Helena Carter being referred to as an “old lady.” Grrr). Manning is also hugely self-assured. Obnoxiously self-assured, I’d go so far as to say. I think I see why Craft did this, but it’s off-putting.
You see, Mark Manning totally believes in himself without hesitation—except about his sexuality, apparently. One of the main thrusts (no pun intended) of the book’s plot is Mark’s coming to grips with a part of himself that he has successfully suppressed all of his life. Apparently, he’s never once considered sex with a man, in spite of being totally hot and successful and a public persona. I guess his Kinsey 4 ability to do it with women has allowed him to hide himself from himself.
Way to piss off a Kinsey 6, you smug bastard.
This sort of panicky closetedness just seems at odds with the kind of man his age in 1997 who is both confident in his beliefs and sure of his abilities—but not, oddly enough, homophobic. Indeed, to my mind both Manning and his best friend Roxanne Exner (great name, BTW) feel like characters stolen out of a gay angst novel from the 1970s, when I was in my twenties and coming out with a vengeance. Roxanne is an interesting woman, just as strong and self-assured as Mark is. But her jealousy of Mark’s friendship, which crossed a few boundaries once upon a time, turns her into a thoroughly unpleasant character for a good chunk of the book, culminating in one of the least enjoyable scenes I’ve ever read. I physically shuddered as I plowed through it, echoes of Ayn Rand’s nasty Howard Roark flickering through my imagination. Effective, I guess, but unpleasant.
But, ultimately I forgave both Manning and Roxanne, because Craft does something very good with his thread of the narrative, which runs parallel to the mystery line. Craft gives us Neil, the beautiful and very out younger architect from Phoenix, whose college friendship with Roxanne adds a sharp edge to the awkward triangle. But it is Neil who forces Mark to look inward. Although this comes very close to what the M/M fiction world refers to as a “gay for you” moment; Craft handles it with emotional fluency. Manning begins to redeem himself with lines like this:
“But the label scares me. Even if no one else knew, I would. I’d be waiting there with the label, and I don’t know what it would do to me.”
It still feels awfully 1970s to me, but at least we are seeing a human, vulnerable Mark Manning. For all his stiffness (Craft never manages to really relax him—I’ll be curious to see how that evolves in the rest of the series), Mark is not surprised by his homosexuality, so much as afraid of it. This refreshing self-doubt creates a dynamic that is honest and believable. Neil’s own brand of serene self-worth and his gifts as an architect (again, shades of Howard Roark!) become the catalysts for what is a genuinely effective romantic subplot. Thank God.
One of the oddest of the book’s surprises was the cats. Abyssinians, to be precise. If you don’t know what these are, you’ll learn just enough to add a strange little bit of unexpected flavor to the story. How Craft stumbled onto this as a plot device I have no idea, but I found myself looking up these exotic, beautiful creatures online because of Craft’s writing about them. This is why I love the Internet.
There is suspense enough and romantic interest enough to pull the reader through this story, in spite of stylistic peculiarities and the above-noted character-based annoyances.
Craft messaged me on Facebook and told me that he’d learned a lot about writing in the seventeen years since this book appeared. Of this I have no doubt, and with this as a first try, I’m very hopeful that I’ll enjoy the others even more.
One small complaint: I now know more than I ever wanted to know about Abyssinian cats.
It was clear early on were the story was headed and who was likely troublemaker.
Still it was nice to read , in fact this I believe is my 4th time reading it over the years but this is first time digitally.
I hope they consider audio, would love to hear it on Audible.