Rusty Puppy

Starred review from December 19, 2016
The murder of Jamar Elton, a young black man, propels Edgar-winner Lansdale’s dark, moving 12th novel featuring crime fighters Hap Collins and Leonard Pine (after 2016’s Honky Tonk Samurai). A witness, recidivist criminal Timpson Weed, claims to have seen three white police officers beat Elton to death near a project house in the East Texas community of Camp Rapture. Unfortunately, Weed soon ends up dead. Aided by a motley crew, including Hap’s daughter, Chance, and Reba, who regards herself as a 400-year-old midget vampire (but is actually a tough-talking adolescent girl from the projects), Hap and Leonard follow a trail that keeps leading them to an old abandoned mill outside town, where illegal dogfights and perhaps even more sinister activities are taking place. As always, Lansdale spins a wild, rollicking yarn, but behind all the mayhem is a heartfelt tale about friendship, brotherhood, loyalty, and family. Hap and Leonard are complicated, violent men, but they display a basic humanity and decency that carries this remarkable series along. Seven-city author tour. Agent: Danny Baror, Baror International.

December 1, 2016
A woman's plea to find her son's murderer sets the stage for the latest Hap and Leonard mystery.When an older black woman engages Hap and Leonard to find out who murdered her son, her plea for them to take her case ends with a bombshell: she believes that the local police are the killers. Not surprisingly, Hap and Leonard soon run afoul of the corrupt police ruling over a scruffy Texas town. But considering the two have a talent for stirring up trouble, they also incur the enmity of a group of bad-news project kids, some local drug dealers, the operators of an illegal fight club, a corrupt lawyer, and generally everyone they run into. The best of the supporting characters is named Reba, a young black girl whom Leonard refers to as a vampire midget and whose dialogue is a consistently delightful work of foulmouthed art. (Imagine Wanda Sykes in Our Gang as directed and written by Quentin Tarantino.) The pleasure of any Hap and Leonard mystery is the yin-yang of the two heroes: white/black, straight/gay, liberal/conservative, easygoing/hair-trigger temper. Without making any brotherhood speeches, the books are rough-hewn fables of tolerance in action. Part of the reason it all goes down without any kind of "Kumbaya" ickiness is that Lansdale (Honky Tonk Samurai, 2016, etc.) writes such good smart-ass repartee. He also, though, in book after book, reaches a point where he takes the violence too far and breaks faith with the reader (it was a problem in the first season of the Hap and Leonard TV series as well), including here a rape dealt out to a character we've become fond of and a final brutal fistfight that goes on for too long. Minor blemishes aside, this puppy tells a waggly tale the reader is happy to follow down the roughest paths.

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Starred review from December 15, 2016
Louise Elton needs police help, but the cops in the little East Texas town of Camp Rapture are the problem, not the solution. She thinks her son was murdered and believes the Camp Rapture cops did it. She needs a couple of outsiders to look into it. Hap Collins and Leonard Pine agree to help, though the $65 she offers to pay will hardly cover the gas for a couple trips to Camp Rapture. There is a man in Rapture who says he saw the murder, but he isn't talking. Hap and Leonard blunder through Rapture, annoying everyone in sight. What they learn is that the cops are operating a fight club in which the dead losers, usually desperately poor residents, are dumped in a toxic pond left over from an old paper mill, becoming rusty puppies. Lansdale is an Edgar-winning author (The Bottoms, 2000) of more than 40 novels across genres. His ongoing Hap and Leonard series has become a popular Sundance TV show, which will be back for its second season in 2017. The novels themselves are a unique mix of sly humor and horrific violence. Readers will laugh at some particularly profane smart-ass repartee and then want to cover their eyes a couple sentences later as the violence explodes. Another fine entry in a great series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)