The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday Paperback – 7 April 2020

Full disclosure: I'm a fan of David Corbett's work, from The Devil's Redhead to The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday. His characters come alive on the page, and this novel is no exception. Even secondary characters are complex, especially if you take Rayella's boyfriend's group of ex-marines as a single character. Memorable well-drawn characters are Corbett's trademark--pretty much what you would expect from the author of The Art of Character, a highly regarded work on character development. Nearly every person in The Long-Lost Love Letters has some kind of redeeming value (with the notable exceptions of Judge Littman and his sleaze-bag lawyer Rankin) and all of them are flawed. In a word, they all feel real.There are interesting parallels here. The lost love of Doc Holliday and his cousin Mattie, for instance, mirrors the lost love of Tuck Mercer and Meredith Littman, the judge’s wife. The devastating gun battle at the end of the novel has the feeling (if not the same number of participants) of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, but with much more sophisticated weapons.There are very few survivors here. Lisa Balamaro is alive at the last page, but she is scared by the experience. She's strong, intelligent and flawed, but we expect her to prosper. Meredith Littman also survives, but she is left without her husband, without the love of her life, and without the love letters of the title.Whether those love letters are real or not is a point of contention throughout the story, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Had they survived the fire Meredith sets, they would have been valuable whether or not they were fakes created by master forger Tuck Mercer. More interesting to me is the fact that Corbett has composed this several-letters-long correspondence so well, keeping to the personalities of both Doc Holliday and Mattie, that they seem absolutely real. We have in effect two forgers here, and Corbett is the master.

It's not often you come across someone who can write as well as David Corbett. For those who haven't discovered him yet, buy this book! What an amazing read. His characters, all flawed, are all believable. His plot is fast-paced, but this is not your typical run and gun thriller.Corbett's novel will make you think, and yet that doesn't slow down the story. I especially like his ending. This is one of those novels you must read to the very last page to get the true meaning of the book. Other reviewers have described the plot, I want to talk about the experience. What a read. What a joy. I am not often moved by a thriller. This is one I will remember for a long, long time. The writing is simply beautiful.

What might make trouble for some readers—the blending of thriller, historical, epistolary, contemporary—was what I found most appealing. I think its moving around between these things reflects the nature of the world and of people. We are all tied up in the now and the past, our own physical selves in the world, and what we believe about where we come from, the speed of current events, and the slowness of reflection. Well done. If you like to read in the space where many things meet, this is it. Read this, I recommend it.

In the end, I was disappointed in this book. The letters between Doc Holliday and his cousin are by far the best bits, but they're too few and take too much of a back seat to the present-day action. I'm sure this was the author's intention, but I think it made for a weaker book. Also, the very high level of violence in the last quarter of the book seemed gratuitous.

This was such a great read! I loved it to the final page. Nobody creates characters that are so real you expect to meet them when you put the book down like David Corbett. Come spend some time in the world of The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday. It will be time well spent.