Review by New York Times Review
I'D KNOW THAT VOICE anywhere. It's the seductive drawl and lowdown dirty laugh of Walter Mosley's mellow private eye, Easy Rawlins. And he's talking his way through another case in CHARCOAL JOE (Doubleday, $26.95), purely as a favor to his fearsome friend, Mouse, who's "mostly evil and definitely a killer," but dangerously attractive for all that. In passing this job along to Easy, Mouse is doing a favor of his own for Charcoal Joe, a criminal legend who wants Easy to exonerate a young black university professor accused of murder by finding the real killer of two white men in a beach house in Malibu. It's May 1968, nearly three years after the Watts riots, but black neighborhoods are still simmering with rage. "Life was like a bruise for us," Easy says about a nasty flare-up in an otherwise peaceful barber shop. "We examine every action for potential threats, insults and cheats." That's why it's such a joy to hang around with Easy, who is ... easy. No furies in his brain, no fires in his gut, just an unquenchable curiosity about people and their personal dramas. Following the meandering plot is beside the point once Mosley starts bringing on his familiar characters for Easy to chat up. It's tempting to pick favorites. There's Jackson Blue, "an odd product of the American ghetto," who used his formidable intellect to make his private fortune but couldn't outrun the fears imprinted by his impoverished background. And here comes Fearless Jones, the amiable strongman with fists like hams and a baby's pure heart. Easy's lady friends, like Mama Jo, the "backwoods witch," and the "beautiful and stormy and self-assured" Coco Ray, are vibrant creatures all. And they seem to end every interview with sexual favors. None of this should imply that Easy is a pushover. As the awesome Mouse once told him: "I couldn't live like you, Brother Easy, uniform bangin' on the front do' and a cougar lurkin' out back." Easy is a brave man, it's true, not just because he'll do battle with bruisers twice his size, but because he isn't ashamed to declare himself "a man of strategy" - a man unafraid to lower his fists and use his brain. "THERE ARE NO churches in Willnot," James Sallis assures us in WILLNOT (Bloomsbury, $26). This quirky Virginia town also has "no Walmart, no chain grocery or pharmacy, discount or big-box stores. No billboards, no street advertising, plain storefronts." Given all this, who would even bat an eye when Tom Bales's hunting dog, Mattie, sniffs out several bodies scattered in quicklime? Willnot may have no use for conformity, but it's surprisingly tolerant of rebels, radicals, conspiracy theorists and plain old oddballs. That pretty much covers the entire populace, from feisty Miss Ellie ("You can't fix stupid. And you sure as hell can't kill it") to brooding Bobby Lowndes, a former Marine sniper who's being stalked by another marksman. Even Dr. Lamar Hale, the personable and presumably square narrator of the story, once fell into a mysterious yearlong coma and felt his body become host to the spirits of the living and the dead. (Dr. Hale's father, a "literary outrider and trickster," wrote a novel with a similar plot.) A worthy mouthpiece for Sallis's melodic cadences, Dr. Hale is goodness personified, a sweet and caring man who doesn't need to inhabit his patients' bodies to understand their lives. WHO WOULDN'T LOVE to catch a glimpse of a favorite sleuth as a blundering amateur? Cara Black lets us do just that in MURDER ON THE QUAI (Soho Crime, $27.95), which reveals how Aimée Leduc, her fashionable Parisian private investigator, joined the business founded by her father and grandfather. It's November 1989, an exciting time for Aimée. The Berlin Wall has fallen, young people are beginning to connect on giant cellphones, and Leduc père is busy elsewhere, leaving her alone to work her first case. In investigating the murder of a distant relative's father, Aimée is drawn into the secretive wartime past of a provincial village. The case is engrossing, complete with Vichy flashbacks, but the most fun are the scenes where Aimée meets her future partners and acquires Miles Davis, her beloved bichon frisé. One caveat: For such a clotheshorse, Aimée doesn't do nearly enough shopping. BOB REYNOLDS, who calls himself "a dyspeptic poet with a little family money," is a stranger in town, and Doker, Ark., is the kind of town that doesn't take kindly to strangers. In CB McKenzie's outsider regional mystery BURN WHAT WILL BURN (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $24.99), Reynolds rashly makes a play for the local beauty, Tammy Fay Smith, ignoring the prior claim of Sam Baxter, High Sheriff of Poe County, who also happens to be the county's High Drug Lord. Under these awkward circumstances, Reynolds has a hard time convincing the sheriff that he saw a dead man in a red shirt floating in the Little Piney Creek, especially when the body disappears. A poet is no match for the crackers in this backwoods barrel, and although Reynolds is fascinated by the casual violence that governs Poe County's customs, he finally gets the message. "In strange lands, foreigners reach the limits of their Local Knowledge only as allowed by Locals and that is why foreigners are called Foreign and locals are called Local," he observes - on his way out of town.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Noir, we tell ourselves, is nothing but a style, a kind of literary device for writing about lives lived in extremis. And then we read James Sallis and realize that noir is all around us. Sure, it's there in Sallis' archetypal noir, Drive (2005), about a getaway-car driver who can never drive fast enough to escape his own life, but it's also there in this very different novel about a small-town southern doctor who finds his noir in everyday life and in the lives of his patients. It wouldn't get better for Frieda, or would do so by tiny, invisible increments. She would never be fine. She would never see fine, never so much as catch sight of it on a hilltop far away, beckoning. There is very little crime in this novel, despite an opening scene in which bodies are discovered in the woods and a subplot concerning a CIA agent dragging trouble in his wake. But there are many examples of Dr. Luther Hale trying to make life better for those around him by those tiny, invisible increments, while the days lumbered on, as they will. Despite the omnipresence of storm clouds, there is also a remarkably tender love story here, as Hale and his partner, Richard, a teacher, make a life for themselves as they tend the wounded souls they encounter on a daily basis and deal with the kind of random violence that drags the quotidian into a form of extremis all its own. A profoundly moving, quietly eloquent jewel of a novel.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The discovery of a mass grave in the woods outside present-day Willnot, a small Southern town, opens this sly, nuanced tale from Sallis (Others of My Kind). Lamar Hale, Willnot's indefatigable general practitioner and surgeon, investigates. Meanwhile, Bobby Lowndes, a troubled young combat vet whom Hale treated years before, suddenly appears back in his hometown. Lowndes's intentions are unclear, and his ghostly presence is unsettling, especially when the FBI arrives in Willnot on his trail. Things get really eerie when Lowndes is shot by an unknown sniper, and he promptly walks out of the hospital and disappears. A series of violent incidents culminates with the shooting of Hale's partner, Richard. Hale's instinctive resistance to pat generalizations and reductive diagnoses makes him an effective and compassionate healer-and a good amateur sleuth. Sallis is without peer when it comes to interweaving seemingly disparate narrative threads, and his work consistently challenges readers to question their assumptions about themselves and other people. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From veteran Sallis (Others of My Kind, 2013, etc.) comes this short, charming novel that's part noir mystery and part small-town slice of life. The story starts fast and portentously (its first four words are "We found the bodies"), and the book has the form of a suspense novel: there's a bewildering mass grave that must be excavated; a suddenly returned native, Bobby Lowndes, a boyhood-coma survivor who seems to be a military sniper gone AWOL, who keeps managing, wraithlike, to hide in plain sight; a dogged FBI agent named Theodora Ogden in town to track Lowndes; and more. It also has a talky, noirish tone, with lots of snappy patter and sharp, laconic, philosophical observation. But at its core, and satisfyingly, this turns out to be a character-driven novel about a thoroughly thoughtful, decent, compassionate doctor, Lamar Hale, and his community of colleagues, patients, friends, and acquaintances. Lamar and his wisecracking romantic partner, Richard, a teacher, provide a still domestic center around which the chaos revolves. Part of it is the usual stuff of noir, expertly deployed, and part the material of the eccentric-small-town novel. Sallis builds suspense over the many months the story spans by alternating between plot point and shaggy dog anecdote, making the reader wonder when and how the novel's two kinds of plot and rhythm will entwine: when will the violence and darkness finally encroach on this cozy domestic sphere and threaten or destroy it? Sallis' latest has a lot to recommend it: an ingenious and unusual use of the MacGuffin; pungent dialogue; a world that's either dark shot through with abundant light or light shot through with abundant dark; likable, complex characters. A brisk and sure-handed treat. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
