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This paperback original is pretty darn original and it's pretty well-written. I mean that in a slightly different way than I often do: usually I'm trying to say the author has a wonderful way with vocabulary and puts things in ways that make me gasp with pleasure. Here what I found so delightful is the cadence of language and dialogue. The book is called on its cover "A working man's mystery". While I think that's a slightly odd classification -- who's working class? The reader? The author? The characters? -- L T Fawkes' protagonist Terry Saltz is a carpenter, who occasionally delivers pizzas too. He hangs out with his buddies, lives in a trailer, and comes across as 100 per cent real. He sounds like he should; yeah, he swears on occasion but you know what? People do. The characters here may be blue-collar workers, they may smoke and eat take-out and junk food, but they're caring, they're tolerant (often finding themselves bemused by life when they realize someone's oh, gay, and not what they thought) and they're not stereotypes. The plot almost made me run away; I have a real distaste of "coming to the rescue" types of stories. Terry, whose wife Marylou dumped him when he got into trouble -- she served him with divorce papers while he was in lock-up -- tries to get her out of a jam. One night in his trailer park, Terry hears shots. One of his roommates is a cop and they discover a dazed woman with a gun. Terry finds a dead man and then everyone realizes the woman is Marylou. Uh-oh. But I kept going because Terry didn't help because Marylou begged him (which is what I expected); it's because Terry's buddies, including John the cop, want to solve the mystery. Marylou may be a bitch (and that IS what Terry calls her) and she's a rather dumb woman who seems to drink too much, but he knows she's not violent. I think Terry and the guys are just nosy. As this is the second book in a series, apparently they had some luck figuring out a murder before, and they saw they could do this. So they do. They know things about people that the cops don't know, and might not find out. Who's the guy? Who wanted him dead? It's pretty clear early on that Marylou didn't do it, which was good plotting -- we didn't end up with one of those stories. Although after that, the motivation for these amateurs might have disappeared, I''d be willing to say they stick with it because they're stubborn, and they know they can do it; just as they can do the dozens of skilled jobs involved in building Smitty's new bar. I found this book as easy as a good conversation. Okay, so I'm not blue collar, and I don't hang in bars, but I've talked to Terry hundreds of times in my life. I know this guy. I lived with someone like him a while back. Dialogue is one of the most difficult aspects of writing fiction in the world; I've read so many books that have intelligent premises, and potentially interesting characters with dialogue so wooden you could build a seesaw from it. Terry, at times, isn't the brightest bulb in the lamp -- he keeps trying to get people to call him "Twees" because he wants a nickname, and doesn't realize that nicknames either come naturally or not at all, but he's right on target about people a lot of the time. He's kind, now that he's sober (he stopped drinking after the incident that got him locked up) and caring, he likes hanging out with friends, and keeps stuff in his vehicle solely to help someone whose car might be stuck. I like that. He's often kind, doesn't allow himself to be patronized by some bozo because the bozo has more money than he does. He laughs with his friends, doesn't necessarily conform, and well, I sort of like the guy. The plot is a bit confused, for me in part because there are too many characters involved. Marylou's turn-around in the book doesn't quite ring true, but I'm not sure it's impossible for someone to know how awful they've been. There's also too much filler; I don't mind at all when the details of daily life are shown in a book; they often help define the place and the people. But I don't need to know that in order to pay for $50.46 worth of stuff at a store, the protagonist took out a $50 and a $1. I don't need to hear that he opened a beer, or dried the dishes, or to get a list of every single plate handed out at the Thanksgiving table. It's not a long book, but the author and editor needs to pare this stuff down before it overwhelms the strong lines of the book. This is the second in the series, and I'm now curious about the first one. Except when Terry says the occasional really dumb and sometimes sexist thing, I like spending time around him.
Reviewed by Andi Shechter, January 2004
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