Title: Death by Facebook
Author: Everett Peacock
Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace (March 4th 2011)
Genre: Mystery
Read: eBook
Stars: ****/5
Summary: (GoodReads)
A vacationing soldier in Hawaii…
Earth’s most active volcano, anxious to repeat itself…
Two murders involving love, madness, friendship, hippies, tsunamis, and the great hereafter…

DEATH BY FACEBOOK by Everett Peacock
Be careful what you say online

Review:

The story plays out in Hawaii where James and Janet have gone for a vacation before he gets deployed to Afghanistan. Janet murders James and the book is about why she did that and the consequences of the murder on the island like a butterfly effect but much closer.

Death by Facebook has a lot of characters but each adds to the story. I found myself relating and feeling for each one of the many characters on the island.

Other than the murder Everett Peacock describes a volcano eruption and its impact on the people on the island. The mix of the kind of people he chooses to tell the story are varied – from a hippie to the police and scientists. The views and reactions of people in crisis fascinated me.

When I picked up this book I thought it would be all about Facebook and a murder but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Facebook played only a small part in the large story. There was so much more happening. The book is written well and grabs the reader. The pace of the story is good with a lot of action.

The book got me thinking about Facebook and just how powerful it could be both to do good and evil. Just how far reaching its messages are and its impact on people.

It also questioned good and evil. Janet starts her journey through the book as an evil person who murders her fiancé but as I went along with the story getting to know her better, I started to question if it was she who was evil or her situation.

I’d recommend this book to all who are looking for something different to read that is still enjoyable.

While drinking tea this morning I remembered an old incident that got me smiling.

Some years ago when we were kids we bought our first emergency light. Big deal you say; it was a big deal. In those days every one of our friends had one at home but we still studied by candlelight. So, getting this box with switches and lights attached as antennae had us jubilant and always finding excuses to use it.

A few months later a strange phenomenon started to happen in our house. Clothes suddenly started to get holes in them. The holes like the hole you get when you drop a lit match head on cloth. But, only Dad smoked so how did granny and I have holes in our clothes. One day we found a towel with a huge hole, as if it had just melted away. Then just as suddenly as it started it stopped. We were bewildered but there just was no answer.

This repeated over time; the holes would start to appear suddenly and then just stop too. Feel free to imagine all the reasons we gave and got. From cigarettes and matches to birds and ghosts. But after a lot of examining of the towel (our biggest evidence with a half foot hole) we came to the conclusion that it was acid. Only acid could melt the cloth so.

Now the search began with renewed vigour. We kids found new theories every day. One theory was the washing machine was causing it in some manner, maybe there was an acid leak somewhere. Another was the birds – maybe the birds pooped on the cloth and the acid in that melted the cloth. All of these fell apart since for the towel hole we would have either needed an entire bird community or a giant condor.

Am sure you’ve figured out the culprit by now. Yes, the famed emergency light had a faulty battery. So when we took it down to use the holes suddenly started and when thanks to KEB (Karnataka Electricity Board) we didn’t need to, they stopped. Of course it took us a few clothes, a towel, a carpet and lots of time to figure this out, but it flamed such creativity.

So, why am I telling you this… No reason, just…

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