Messed Up and Dont Even Know It Book Review
Crime & Mystery
'He Got a Cigarette Stuck in His Cervix, and He Took It Like a Homo.'
Eli Cranor'south top-shelf debut, "Don't Know Tough," is Southern noir at its finest, a cauldron of terrible choices and even more terrible outcomes.
Credit... Pablo Amargo
A mutual joke in criminal offence fiction circles is that asking "What is noir?" volition effect in hours of unending statement. (I tend to go by the writer Jack Bludis's definition: "hard-boiled = tough, noir = screwed.") Eli Cranor'south elevation-shelf debut, DON'T KNOW TOUGH (Soho Crime, 322 pp., $24.95), is unmistakably noir in the Southern tradition, a cauldron of terrible choices and fifty-fifty more terrible outcomes.
Trent Powers is a newcomer in Denton, Ark., where he's been hired to charabanc a local high school football team to playoff victory. To do that, Powers will need to harness the talents of the running back Billy Lowe, who has often short-circuited the squad with his erratic behavior on the field.
Lowe, "a sawed-off white boy with tree-torso thighs, built low and hard to the ground, trapezius muscles bulging up from his shoulders to his earlobes," has long suffered at the hands of his mother's boyfriend: "The other twenty-four hours he got a cigarette stuck in his neck, and he took it like a man." Powers believes his mentorship and the ability of prayer tin can lead his star thespian to a more than righteous path, but it is this very belief that volition cost him — and well-nigh anybody in Denton — all the more dearly.
In that location is a raw ferocity to Cranor's prose, perfectly in keeping with the novel's test of curdling masculinity. "Don't Know Tough" is, so far, one of the best debuts of 2022.
By football glories too figure prominently in HIDEOUT (Doubleday, 350 pp., $27), Louisa Luna'south third novel featuring the individual investigators Alice Vega and Max Caplan. Vega's latest job is to find Zeb Williams, whose college exploits went from legendary to infamous when, in the waning seconds of a key game, he took the ball, ran out of the stadium and vanished.
The married man of Zeb'south former girlfriend is Vega's customer, something she finds odd, simply she'll have the money. The trail leads her to a fearfulness-gripped town in Oregon that's ruled by a couple of families with white supremacist ties. Vega's instinct for pushing abroad assist — particularly that of her former partner Cap — could land her in real trouble.
Luna takes the usual individual eye tropes and imbues them with added resonance. Vega is an excellent investigator who doesn't bounciness back right abroad from physical harm, and her relationship with Cap earns its complexity. I know I'll exist reading more of this series, and you should, too.
"At that place was a saying among these people: A dry out year volition scare you lot to expiry, and a moisture year will kill you." This sense of perpetual dread permeates Dane Bahr's evocative debut, THE HOUSEBOAT (Counterpoint, 242 pp., $26), which chronicles an specially volatile year in Oscar, Iowa — a year when the Mississippi River town turned on its ain as the atmospheric condition moved from drought to torrents: "Iv days of hard rain and the river became a butcher. Information technology would rip at the banks as it swelled and cleave the edges of cropland similar a knife to brisket."
Just outside town, a daughter, discovered in the wood, claims her fellow has been murdered, though no one has found a trunk. All the same, the commonage suspicion lands on Rigby Sellers, a loner who lives in a rotting houseboat on the river with only a creepy salvaged mannequin for visitor: "He'd often talk to her. Sometimes effort to feed her. … He'd dress her upwards and rummage his fingers through her annoying hair and tell her how pretty she was." Sellers seems impervious to increasingly lurid rumors most his character and beliefs. When the local sheriff enlists the help of a detective, events spin ever darker.
Bahr deftly moves back and forth in time; his brusque chapters, which characteristic the perspectives of different townspeople, add to the feeling that the enormity of the horror cannot be fully comprehended. "The Houseboat" reminded me of works past Robert Bloch strained through a more literary — but quite welcome — sensibility.
In the village of Shady Hollow — "nestled deep in the woods, roofing a broad valley between two mountains" — folks drinkable coffee at Joe'due south Mug, purchase the latest releases from Nevermore Books and get their news from The Shady Hollow Gazette. Every so often, the bucolic little town is shaken upward by murder. And oh yeah, one more thing: All the residents are animals.
Common cold Clay (Vintage Law-breaking/Black Cadger, 221 pp., newspaper, $sixteen), the second outing from Juneau Black, the pen name of the authors Jocelyn Cole and Sharon Nagel, was originally self-published in 2017. In it, Vera Vixen, the paper's star reporter, is investigating the discovery of erstwhile moose bones in an apple orchard and trying to articulate Joe Elkin, the java shop's owner as well as the victim's hubby. She'southward as well trying to figure out why a fancy silver-coated mink has moved to town.
Black's books — "Shady Hollow," "Cold Dirt" and "Mirror Lake," which will be reissued next calendar month — take become my favorite new comfort reads. The plotting is sharp, the prose lean and the temper pure joy. Vixen and the rest of the critters never feel like anthropomorphic Disney drawing characters. I eagerly await a fresh infusion of Shady Hollow mayhem.
Sarah Weinman'south Crime column appears twice a calendar month.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/books/review/new-crime-fiction.html
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