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It's likely that people might pick up The Armageddon Rag because they enjoyed George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and were hoping for more of the same.

It isn't. In fact, I thought at first this was a straightforward mystery novel (albeit with a fantasy connection). It's a good mystery, though, my favourite kind, in which the characters rather than the whodunnit are front and centre. The book opens with Sandy Blair, blocked novelist and refugee from the 60s shellshocked by the materialism of the 80s, receiving a blast from the past.

This particular blast is a telephone message from Jared Patterson, Sandy's former editor at the Hedgehog. The Hog was once a counterculture music magazine, but has now sold out like everything else. Jared wants Sandy to come back and write an article for the magazine, about a murder.

It's not just any murder, though. The body belongs to Jamie Lynch, a force from the rock sub-culture that used to be Sandy's home, promoter of Sandy's favourite band, the Nazgûl. He's been gruesomely sacrificed in his office, with the Nazgûl's last album blasting on the stereo.

That pulls Sandy away from page thirty-seven, and into his Mazda RX-7 for a book-length ride into a past he can't escape and can't recapture.

Martin's creation of that past is part of the magic of The Armageddon Rag. His alternate history lives in every detail -- I was almost tempted to go Googling to find out if the West Mesa concert at which the Nazgûl's lead singer was assassinated really happened and somehow was glossed over. Through the book, Sandy relives it all; his quest to find out who killed Jamie Lynch and why takes him down a memory highway of old lovers, enemies and friends.

Meanwhile, someone from that past appears determined to reunite the Nazgûl for one final concert. Sandy finds himself not only trying to solve a murder, but trying to stop that concert, all the while fighting through the personal issues he buried in the past and is now unearthing.

One can't say much more, of course, without spoiling the end. I can say it's a worthwhile trip, all the way. In The Armageddon Rag, Martin builds a never-been time in musical history in all its glory; the only thing the book lacks, to my mind, is a soundtrack album.

Katharine Mills lives a vagabond life in Southwestern Ontario, with a posse of three cats. Aside from reading, she also acts, bakes, and makes things. She rarely sleeps.