Assumption

September 5, 2011
Everett, who has put his uniquely wacky spin on genres from Greek myths to westerns, does the same for crime fiction in his effective follow-up to I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Deputy Ogden Walker, the son of a black father and a white mother, investigates cases for Sheriff Bucky Paz in a “hick-full, redneck county” of New Mexico. He takes a gun away from elderly Emma Bickers after she alarms neighbors by shooting through her door at an unknown figure. Then four bodies turn up at a camp site, including one Ogden spotted in a photo at Bickers’s house. He helps Caitlin Alison, who’s come from Ireland, in her search for her missing cousin, Fiona McDonough, living somewhere in the mountains. Finally, at the request of game and fish patrolman Terry Lowell, Walker takes charge of an 11-year-old boy, the nephew of the poacher Lowell just arrested. Walker, who observes that “othing makes people more interesting than their being dead,” finds plenty of bodies in this often bleak and shocking tale.

October 15, 2011
This detective novel by the genre-bending author is like a series of card tricks in which no one is playing with a full deck. The latest from Everett (I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009, etc.) has all the markings of a mystery novel: a detective, a series of crimes, a sense that people and events might be connected in ways that aren't initially evident. At least such are the assumptions of deputy sheriff Ogden Walker, a black man amid the desert of New Mexico, where most others are white, "in that hick-full, redneck county," but are more often distinguished by their drug habits (primarily meth) and lack of teeth, limbs or both. Readers this world through the eyes of Ogden and will agree with his mother that "You're a good man, Ogden. There are not a lot of good men around." But he's not necessarily a good detective, or maybe the very notion of cause-and-effect, the underpinnings of the classic detective novel, is suspect. The book is divided into three cases, each separate from the others, and none really solved in a conventional sense by Walker and his occasional partner Warren (an Indian who refers to Walker as "cowboy"). In fact, each ends abruptly, surprisingly, without culminating in an accumulation of evidence. When the trail of a suspect leads to a series of dead ends, Ogden realizes that "the longer he drove around Denver, asking his stupid questions, the less he knew what he was doing. And he'd only been there a day; how much could he not know in a week?" Ultimately, readers come to suspect that perhaps Ogden doesn't know himself and that neither do those with whom he works and lives. There are recurring motifs--shifting or mistaken identities, women who initially might seem like a suitable wife for Ogden, mothers, disappearing suspects (or bodies), drug conspiracies and big stashes of cash. Yet not until the last couple of pages does anything add up. Fun to read, but frustrating for those who look for the usual pleasures from detective fiction.

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July 1, 2011

This latest from Dos Passos Prize winner Everett is ostensibly a murder mystery featuring Ogden Walker, deputy of a small New Mexico town, who starts by tracking an old woman's killer and then gets tangled up in other cases that lead to a Denver commune. Complications: Walker had visited the victim shortly before her death, and his footprints are the only ones in evidence. Further complications: he's African American, which means most everyone in town is suspicious of him from the get-go. Not for your average mystery/fiction reader, but an author I'd encourage anyone with a taste for good, thought-provoking writing to investigate.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011

Ogden Walker is a deputy sheriff in a sleepy New Mexico town where little ever seems to happen. That begins to change when an old woman he has just visited is murdered and a young woman is later found dead in a remote cabin. Walker finds himself traveling from Denver to Dallas and throughout New Mexico to investigate a baffling and bloody series of crimes involving drugs, guns, and a mysterious box of money. His task is complicated because he's African American, and this provokes suspicion even from townsfolk who have known him for some time. The novel is ultimately a loosely linked group of three stories unified by a central character, with the title referring as much to the reader's expectations as to the process of investigating a crime. Pen/Dos Passos award winner Everett (I Am Not Sidney Poitier) is making a major point about overturning assumptions, taking a genre novel--a fairly conventional murder mystery--and forcing readers to question their own expectations regarding character, plot, and fictional conventions. VERDICT A work of metafiction that targets the literary rather than the genre reader but may not fully satisfy either. [See Prepub Alert, 6/6/11.]--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.