By Rebecca Promitzer
Chicken House, $17.99, 404 pages

Bea lives with her Mom’s best friend in the incessantly rainy, small town of Elbow. Her father past away when she was nine and her mother now resides in a mental institution. Bea’s best and only friend, Sam, helps to pass the time during the long, rainy summer months. They explore an abandoned house one day early in the summer and find a dead body in the basement. The body was the town’s pickle factory owner. The two join forces with other town kids to solve the mystery making a secret club. The Pickle King takes you on a wild, paranormal ride into a weird, little, oppressed town. Rebecca Promitzer is a screenwriter for television and theater. Her book reads like a B-rated movie ebbing and flowing from eerie to the macabre. The premise and content is beyond what this reviewer would consider a young adult category, more of a suspense, thriller, and adult genre. Imaginative concept but the writing is disappointing in the realism of circumstances and characters. The graphic details of dead bodies and the supernatural are unnecessary to the story’s substance. Sometimes, less is more. 

Reviewed by M. Chris Johnson,