Scott Von Doviak did the unthinkable: he made me take the TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard” more seriously. His latest novel, LOWDOWN ROAD (Hard Case Crime, 287 pages, paperback, $15.95) — with its hapless good ol’ boy anti-heroes dressed in aviator sunglasses, levis hugging the cross, and Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts — clearly takes inspiration from the series.
It is the summer of 1974 in Texas and Chuck Melville, six months after serving time at the Huntsville State Penitentiary, is bored and restless. He and his cousin Dean have come up with a not very bright plan to steal 250 pounds of marijuana and drive it in a jetted Gonzo Taco truck to Idaho, where Evel Knievel (who Dean adores) will jump Snake. River Canyon on his motorcycle. That didn’t work out too well for Knievel, and it looks like the Melvilles’ plan will also result in ill-advised catastrophe.
“The Dukes of Hazzard” had a social contract with its viewers: no matter what trouble they got, the boys would always prevail and get through another episode. You don’t have that guarantee with a book like this, which makes it even more fun to read.
THE Bitter Past (Minotaur, 305 pp., $28)Bruce Bourgos’ impressive first effort introduces Porter Beck, a longtime military intelligence officer who has returned home to the Nevada high desert where he is now sheriff – the same job his father held until he was diagnosed with dementia.
“The long stretches of public road cause more than our share of road deaths,” Beck says at the beginning, “but there just aren’t many people who intentionally kill other people. When we encounter it, it is never so. This is something from hell.”
“This” is the torturous murder of an FBI agent who soon brings another federal police stranger to town. It’s not long before Beck realizes the murder has something to do with one of the agent’s old investigations, which looked at links between a Soviet spy and the area’s radiation-spitting nuclear testing program in the 1950s. Beck’s father is also somehow involved in the case, though his ability to help his son sort things out is limited. Beck must find out what has been lost to history and what remains, no matter how deep and dangerous an excavation may be.
A physicist and a psychic meet during an ice storm – sounds like the opening of a joke with a killer punchline, right? But Mindy Mejia’s CATCHING A STORM (Atlantic Monthly Press, 352 pp., $27), the first in a new series after several self-contained suspense stories, it proves to be a more propulsive affair – though it starts off slow, only picking up steam around page 100.
The physicist is Eve Roth, who is frantically searching for her missing husband, a University of Iowa chemistry professor who was recently suspended for inappropriate behavior with students — and who, it seems, had serious money problems that he long hid from her had held. The psychic is Jonah Kendrick, a private investigator who claims to have “certain parapsychological abilities”. He tells Eve that her husband is “stuck in a barn” and needs to be rescued.
“What’s your source?” she asks. If he replies, “I…saw him. In a dream,” she rages, “The only way to see things from a distance is with a telescope.”
But with no other leads and few results from the police, Eve and Jonah begin to investigate together. The rational and the inexplicable collide as it becomes clear that Eve’s husband is not the only one in grave danger. Mejia sets things up well for further teamwork and conflict between Jonah and Eve, at the point where we can and want to believe.
Kelly J. Ford’s previous two books, “Cottonmouths” and “Real Bad Things” beautifully evoked the dark poetry of the Ozarks. In THE HUNT (Thomas & Mercer, 353 pages, paperback, $16.99) Ford gives the town of Presley, Ark. residents vie to find an egg worth $50,000: “Since KCLS 103.9 FM’s inaugural Hunt for the Golden Egg in 2005, 17 civilians … have mysteriously died or disappeared.” Nell Holcomb has never known what to make of it: Was her brother the alleged killer’s first victim, or is there a more complicated explanation?
The answer is obviously the latter, but the way Ford wraps up the story and depicts Nell’s internal struggles really makes “The Hunt” compelling. You will not find neat stories or simple judgments here.
Sarah Weinman is the Crime & Mystery columnist for the Book Review; the most recent author of “Scoundrel”; and the editor of the upcoming anthology “Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning.”
