Dry County

November 15, 2018
Although Lou Rossi is living alone in a crummy Little Havana apartment in the late 1990s and barely hanging onto his job as a gag cartoonist for the Miami Herald, he thinks his luck is finally changing when he meets a beautiful albeit troubled young woman who quickly shows an interest in him, as well. But when his new love interest suddenly disappears, and her apartment is ransacked, Lou becomes a Generation-X gumshoe to find out if she's been kidnapped by one of her ex-boyfriends, the bar-owner she'd recently broken up with, or the abusive gambler she left back in Texas two years ago. The notion of a slacker sleuth stumbling into cases has its appeal, but the diffident Lou, gentle to a fault, is more of a Sham Spade, and the mystery essentially soft-boiled. Tommaso's boldly cartoony artwork and the tropical noir South Florida setting with its Miami Vice pastels just about compensate for the slow pace at which the mystery unfolds and Lou's drab personality.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)