Jackrabbit Smile

For almost 30 years, the detective team of Hap and Leonard has been solving crimes, doling out beatings, and delivering their unique brand of Texas humor--much of it dealing with excrement, flatulence, and male sex organs. Although a lot of this audiobook is laugh-out-loud funny, Christopher Ryan Grant--in his third turn narrating the series--wisely doesn't play it for laughs. Instead, he concentrates on creating believable characters who are placed in unlikely situations. Equally important, Grant's use of East Texas accents and idioms sounds natural and avoids caricature. In this adventure, the duo is hired to locate a young bookkeeper who believes she can travel to other dimensions. Though the villains are successfully dispatched--one suffers death by hungry hogs--the battle is really against bigotry. R.W.S. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

January 29, 2018
Hap Collins and his longtime love, Brett Sawyer, have finally decided to tie the knot in Edgar-winner Lansdale’s raucous 13th Hap and Leonard novel (after 2017’s Rusty Puppy), but they’ve barely gotten the burgers and hot dogs on the grill for their East Texas–style wedding party when two uninvited guests arrive. The heavily tattooed man, Thomas Mulhaney, wears a white pride T-shirt, and his mother, Judith, looks to be out of backwoods Pentecostal central casting. Hap’s best friend, Leonard Pine, a black Republican and Vietnam vet, prepares to escort them off the property in his usual inimitable way. But then the pair ask if they can hire the detectives to look into the disappearance of Thomas’s sister, Jackie. Hap and Leonard hold their noses and agree to investigate. The trail leads them to the nearby town where Jackie, an accounting whiz with strange views on interdimensional travel, was last seen. There they meet a hog farmer known as Professor, who has plans of creating a segregated white utopia aided by assorted local yokels and a pair of lethal twin brothers. As always, Lansdale provides a wild, fun ride with an astute eye on social issues. Agent: Danny Baror, Baror International.