Reviewer:

Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews

So you'd like to enjoy a fast-paced, suspenseful mystery but don't want to spend an entire week wading through several hundred pages? Ray Atkinson may have just what you're looking for in The Black Tea Experiments. At less than 150 pages, this is a novel you can comfortably read in one sitting - and it's a pretty good read, to boot. This thing takes you from Illinois to Louisiana to the Ukraine and back, throwing into the mix an unusual murder, arson, a Russian Mafioso/scientist, unnaturally intelligent youngsters, detectives, hidden identity, and all kinds of other good stuff. It takes a shortcut or two along the way, but it's still a solid story that proves pretty engaging throughout.

All young Logan Bauer, a student at Central Illinois University, wants to do is to continue amazing the astronomical community with the incredible night-time shots produced by his own specially designed telescope and imaging software. Thanks to a broken spring in the device, though, the telescope ends up snapping several shots of a murder on one of the streets of his sleepy college town. It's bad enough that his girlfriend Tia starts acting all weird about his attempts to capture the face of the killer, but it is very much worse when some mysterious group (which he suspects are rather violent Russians) lets him know that they know all about his little pictures and will stop at nothing to get their hands on them. Too scared to go to the cops - not with a gang of violent Russians after him - Logan struggles not so much to do the right thing as just to stay alive.

Things just get curiouser and curiouser as time goes on. The first murder is more complicated than originally suspected, a second death in the small community gets the citizens all up in arms, and Tia is arrested and charged with the original murder. The whole sordid mess is eventually traced back to a secret Soviet Cold War project (dubbed The Black Tea Experiments) designed to increase the intelligence of a select group of young test subjects, and Logan has to prepare himself to enter the eye of that storm if he has any chance of getting Tia's name cleared.

Even when you think the story is all played out, Ray Atkinson has another twist or two up his sleeve. The author really accomplishes a lot in a limited number of pages, and this format keeps the story blazing along from start to finish. This could have been a much longer novel, one that dealt with a number of questions and possibilities that Atkinson raised along the way, but the author set out to create a relatively short, exciting mystery and that is exactly what he has done. Let us hope it is just the first of many.