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August Snow is back, cracking wise and causing trouble for anyone who threatens his Mexicantown neighbors. Once a Detroit cop, now restoring the houses on the street he was raised on with the proceeds of a wrongful dismissal lawsuit, he's tipped off when the body of a young Latina girl is found in the Detroit River, apparently a suicide, drugged to the gills and dressed in a Marie Antoinette costume. The coroner, disturbed by signs the girl had been trafficked, asks his old friend to check it out. Maybe someone in the neighborhood can identify her. Maybe somebody ought to care.
He's asking the right man, an African/Mexican American white knight who is equally comfortable running off over-enthusiastic Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents trolling for undocumented residents to deport and tracking down the power behind a trafficking scheme run by neo-Nazi bikers and rogue ICE agents.
If Robert B. Parker's Spencer had been born "Blaxican" in Detroit in the late 1990s, he could be August Snow's identical twin. Jones has a lyrical turn with words, occasionally dropping in lines of poetry, and he can't resist snappy dialogue that is, actually, laugh-out-loud funny much of the time. Instead of Boston, the setting of Detroit and its grittier environs adds a rich sense of place and a jaunty narrative voice. Like Spencer, Snow combines street smarts with culinary skills and a sense of honor that seems to trigger an overproduction of testosterone. As a police officer says to him, "You need a continuous adrenaline rush to feel both alive and worthy of folks' affection. Without that turbo-charged psycho-chemical rush, you'd crash and burn."
This points to the greatest drawback of the otherwise richly entertaining novel. Every threat requires an arsenal of lovingly-described weaponry (though apparently Snow's favorite sidearm is that notorious Writer's Special, the Glock 9mm that has a safety; you'd think the memo would have reached every New York editor by now.) The action scenes work, as such, but there are too many of them and the heroes are almost comically invincible. In fact, the plot would make a great comic or an action film, but for it to work in fiction the reader has to take it on its own terms and set aside any need for realism or scruples about the corrosiveness of American gun culture.
That's the contradiction of August Snow. He's devoted to caring for his neighbors and taking care of stray teens. He loves his city as fiercely as he hates ICE and injustice. He's a toxically masculine social justice warrior who punches people out and solves problems with firepower but can sit quietly on a front stoop with friends to mourn the loss of neighbors forced to leave one step ahead of ICE. "This was our velario – our wake – where prayers settled on the tongue like ash."
He's good company, but he'd be even better if he didn't need that turbo-charged psycho-chemical rush quite so often. No doubt its an homage to classic American tough-guy crime fiction, but it's time to put our weapons down.
§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, January 2019
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