Living the Gimmick by Bobby Mathews is a fun novel, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of pro wrestling. The story moves back and forth between the present-day wrestling world and its history over the past thirty years or so. That expanse of time has witnessed tremendous changes in what pro wrestling is and how it is understood by both participants and spectators, the most momentous changes being, one, the end of the wrestling territories at the hand of a predatory promoter who consolidated all the business nationwide and, two, the public admission that pro wrestling is staged—entertainment, not a true catch-as-catch-can competition.

Focused on engaging protagonist Alex Donovan and his search for who killed his friend Ray “The Wild Child” Wilder, Mathews interweaves the history, business, and backstage/in-ring practices of pro wrestling throughout the narrative. Donovan discovers, in the process, who his friend was—or at least who he became in his later years—and that their friendship of over twenty and more years might not have been exactly what Donovan believed it to be.

Bobby Mathews brings Living the Gimmick to life with his insider knowledge of the world in which his story lives. He treats the off-center world of professional wrestling in the USA and in the South particularly (excepting one striking jaunt to Europe) with fairness. The novel balances, for example, the manufactured nature of the wrestling business with the actual athleticism of the wrestlers. Likewise, women wrestlers live and work in the patriarchal world of pro wrestling, and the novel acknowledges this but gives characters like Kat and Penny more reality than women wrestlers are usually granted in the context of the wrestling entertainment.

Publisher Shotgun Honey is building a strong catalogue of crime-oriented fiction. This is my second (following Chris McGinley’s Coal Black), and I have two more high on my to-be-read list. Living the Gimmick by Bobby Mathews is a nice notch on Shotgun Honey’s title belt.