Nameless Dame

January 23, 2012
Schneider’s second Augie Boyer mystery (after 2008’s The Man in the Blizzard) takes the marijuana-smoking Midwestern PI out of Minneapolis and off his drug of choice only to deposit him in the pot-saturated heart of Northern California’s Russian River Valley. Soon after Augie arrives at the “off-the-grid” cottage of his onetime assistant, Blossom, and her former police detective husband, Bobby Sabbatini, Ruthie Rosenberg, a party girl and drug user, is found murdered. While the killing dampens the area’s optimistic New Age spirit, Augie is more interested in Blossom’s friend Quince, an enticing and mercurial ex-con. Bobby, meanwhile, tries to keep the approaching opening of his “poetry karaoke bar,” Ginsberg’s Galley, on track. Rather than hackneyed drug humor, Schneider focuses on showing a community that, under Bobby’s spell, has fallen in love with poetry. His charming and original characters should ensure returning readers for any future Augie Boyer outings.

April 15, 2012
Minneapolis private eye Augie Boyer (The Man in the Blizzard, 2008, etc.) spends some time in Sonoma County, with equally shaggy results. Augie's friend Bobby Sabbatini has undertaken an even longer journey. A St. Paul homicide cop who retired to the Russian River hamlet of Guerneville, he's about to open a poetry karaoke bar where like-minded folks can spout Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens and refresh themselves between verses. Augie's visit to Bobby, his wife Blossom and their baby Milosz doesn't go exactly as planned. No sooner has he arrived than the town is buzzing over the murder of wild child masseuse Ruthie Rosenberg, a local fixture shot execution-style in the Last Judgment Campground. Deputy Jesse Coolican, who's long carried a torch for Ruthie, is so hard hit that Augie's assigned to stay with him instead of Bobby and Blossom--a good thing, since they're now entertaining a new arrival, Bobby's "new wife" Quince, who's helping out the couple and sleeping in what Augie thought of as his bed. (Not that Augie would mind sharing it with her.) Is the murder linked to the shooting years ago of two Christian kids on Fish Head Beach? To Rev. Cecil Hyde's vociferously anti-poetry ministry at the First Christ River of Blood Church? To a pair of Russian entrepreneurs' plan to open a casino on the Russian River? And who's going to solve the case while the most-likely sleuths keep themselves busy smoking up? The mystery plot commands so little attention that you know it's a throwaway. The big attractions here are Augie's voice, the loopy milieu and the recitation of more poems, new and old, than you've seen in the genre for a coon's age.

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Starred review from February 15, 2012
When we last saw weed-smoking PI Augie Boyer, he was foiling neo-Nazis in Minneapolis. Now he's off the weed and on the road, visiting his buddy Bobby Sabbatini, the former cop turned poetry evangelist, in the wacked-out wilds of Sonoma County. Augie arrives at chez Bobby just in time for the opening of Bobby's new project: a poetry karaoke bar! But before the locals can start reciting their favorite poems, there's the matter of a murder to solve. A drug-addicted woman, Ruthie Rosenberg, has been found shot twice in the back of the head, and Augie has agreed to help out with the investigation. And so he does, while still finding time to talk Wallace Stevens with Bobby and fall in love with another Sabbatini houseguest. Schneider's vision of a world where everyone, high and low, criminal and otherwise, is susceptible to the clarion call of poetry is somewhere between parody and utopia, but either way, it's utterly delightful. That murder occasionally breaks the rhythm of the free-flowing verse serves to inject a little reality into the proceedings, but the charm of this series is its eccentricity, not its procedural detail. What's not to love about a world where you can sidle into a bar and order up a little Richard Hugo?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)