“Crap! What are you doing here?”
Poor Lem Altick is just a kid selling encyclopedias door-to-door to raise money for college and get the hell out of the cesspool known as Florida. And he’s pretty good at it, too. He’s sitting in the Meadowbrook Grove (a noted Fla speed trap) trailer of Karen and Bastard, about ready to sink the hook and get the down payment. Karen is writing the check when our ethical assassin, Melford Kean, throws open the door and plunks Karen and Bastard with a 9mm right between their eyes. Whoops. Melford notices Lem sitting there. “Crap! What are you doing here?”
And so begins the saga of young Lem and his dealings with Melford who constantly challenges Lem with arguments about the ethics of this and that. Along with this minor ethical breech of murder is Police Chief Jim Doe who not only runs Meadowbrook Grove, he is also the proud owner of an inherited industrial hog farm, an under the radar meth lab, and a really tender set of ‘nads courtesy of a Miami reporter who wouldn’t play along when pulled over for speeding. Or how about B.B. Gunn, the head of the encyclopedia scam, and his girl Friday Desiree, the surviving conjoined twin. Now B.B. rationalizes his fascination with young boys by calling himself a mentor all the while having a couple idiot teenagers selling Doe’s drugs under the cover of the encyclopedia bookmen. And then there is The Gambler who does Gunn’s bidding. And Bobby, the crew boss who is skimming payments from his set of sellers.
So, why were Karen and Bastard killed? Turns out Melford is not only a reporter, but also a member of an animal rights group investigating stolen pets and a research lab that buys strays. Melford repeatedly takes Lem on an ethical debate and the one about the exceptionalism of man takes oh, maybe 5+ pages of tedium.
Anyway, in the course of 48 hours, Lem witnesses 2 murders, stumbles across 4 more bodies, relaxes his personal ethics for an Indian book seller on the team, survives a dip in a hog waste pond, and walks away with $40K for college.
Liss has authored a bunch of historical novels and Whiskey Rebels was favorably reviewed here. This more contemporary tale has been compared to Hiaason’s humorous blasting of all things Florida. While I wouldn’t say this is as clever as anything Hiaason has done, it still pokes fun at industrial farming, drug runners, dirty cops, salesmen, and, most importantly, people who hide behind ethical arguments to rationalize their position. This took me longer to read than anticipated, probably because of a hangover from that 950 page monster by Clancy. I’ll probably look at Liss’s Edgar award winning historical mystery A Conspiracy of Paper sometime in the future. I just have to get the image of Lem diving under the surface of the hog pond searching for his just shot ethical advisor out of my mind.
East Coast Don
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