Not Untrue and Not Unkind

April 5, 2010
O'Loughlin's mixed debut finds newspaperman Owen Simmons in possession of his dead colleague's files and, more importantly, a secret they contain. It is Simmons's ensuing tale of his African war reporting that promises to reveal what that secret is, but late in the book, when a minor character publishes “a memoir of sorts” that shares the title and characters of this novel, the reader begins to suspect that Simmons has found in his dead colleague a convenient MacGuffin to string readers through his own war stories. They're good anecdotes that evoke the danger of battle, the horror of its aftermath, and the camaraderie of the brooding and maniacal “bigfeet,” nomads, fixers, stringers, and “lens monkeys” who witness it, but the intrigue promised in the first chapter doesn't run evenly through the story, and Simmons doesn't give away enough of himself, leaving readers with no one to really care for.