A Welcome Murder

Starred review from February 13, 2017
Memorable oddball characters, whose ambitions collide with results ranging from comic to fatal, populate Yocum’s exceptionally clever novel set in Steubenville, Ohio, a once-thriving town near the West Virginia border. Johnny Earl, an ex-con who was once destined for a great pro baseball career, returns home from Pittsburgh hoping to retrieve his hidden nest egg. Sheriff Francis Roberson has dreamed since childhood of becoming president of the United States, and he has a plan. Roberson’s wife, Allison, has one driving goal—to get out of Steubenville. Dena Marie Conchek Androski Xenakis, former homecoming queen, she of multiple marriages and affairs, is still in love with Johnny. Dena’s insecure husband, Smoochie Xenakis, has put up with insults and abuse all his life. The murder of unsavory Rayce Daubner, who’s intimately connected with all the others,
initiates the chaos, which one seemingly minor character quietly manages. Yocum (A Brilliant Death) has produced a rollick-
ing tale sure to appeal to Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard fans. Agent: Colleen Mohyde, Doe Coover Agency.

Starred review from February 1, 2017
In a 180-degree turn from the sorrowful A Brilliant Death (2016), Yocum releases a farcical basket of deplorables in Steubenville, Ohio, and lets them crawl all over each other in search of criminal advantage.Nobody mourns the passing of Rayce Daubner, shot to death in an isolated park. Not Johnny Earl, the hometown baseball hero he hooked on cocaine and then turned in to the FBI. Not Dena Marie Conchek Androski Xenakis, the homecoming queen who became Rayce's lover years after Johnny left her behind in his abortive bid for Major League glory. Not Matthew Vincent "Smoochie" Xenakis, Dena Marie's current husband, a timid social worker who came away with serious damage the one time he confronted Daubner about his adulterous affair. Not Jefferson County Sheriff Francis Delano Roberson, Johnny's high school friend who's still carrying a torch for Dena Marie even though he's married to Allison Roberson, chief dispatcher for the sheriff's office. Not even Alfred Vincenzio, the FBI agent to whom Daubner reported, who's been out to get Fran Roberson ever since Fran stole Allison away from him at the FBI Academy. But when Vincenzio threatens to shame Fran by snatching the case away from him, it's clear that somebody's got to pay, and that's when two of the suspects reveal hidden depths: Johnny Earl, because he'd rather languish in prison than get released to the tender mercies of his neo-Nazi cellmate, Alaric Himmler, who wants to use the $472,000 in drug money Johnny's stashed to finance the Aryan Republic of New Germania, and Smoochie Xenakis, who's determined to make hay out of the idea that he might have had the gumption to kill someone, and might even do it again. As if the raucous plot isn't complicated enough, Yocum filters it all through a system of dueling first-person narrators whose perspectives are amusingly at odds with each other to produce a memorably merry tale of murder most richly deserved.

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Starred review from February 1, 2017
Rayce Daubner, the biggest jerk in Steubenville, Ohio, is murdered just before this superb novel gets under way. That's fine with everybody, from the drug dealer Rayce betrayed to the sad sack he'd picked on ever since high school. Even the town sheriff, with his curious connection to the creep, is glad he's gone. But the death still has to be investigated, and the progress of the inquiry is tracked in alternating chapters by five locals, all involved in bad ways with the slimy Rayce. The narrative fascinates as much for its artfulness as for the revelations that come through the multiple points of view: the splendid pacing, the deceptively simple prose, and the high-energy boiling just beneath it all prove addictive. The characters, too, linger in the memory: The high-school sports god now pushing cocaine; the wife who will do anything to flee Steubenville; the much-ridiculed Smoochie, who goes from punching bag to town tough when he's accused of the murder. The revelation, when it comes at the end, is still kept from most of the characters. But we know, and that's enough.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)