THE VIPER

An unlikely duo deals with multiple connected murders.

Andrew Fechmeier, dying from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, stitches a secret object in the suit he plans to be buried in and leaves it in a funeral home. Then in a motel, an attacker stabs him to death when he doesn’t divulge where the object is, setting up a series of slayings in this tense thriller. The trouble had started years ago with a group of teenagers calling themselves The Breakfast Club, named after the movie. They’d stolen the object that now is getting them killed, one by one. This is the third outing for Zig and Nola, who are not friends or colleagues—she doesn’t even especially like him, but each has helped the other in times of dire need. Jim “Zig” Zigarowski is a skilled mortician who has helped make many combat victims look presentable. An amiable but odd fellow, “it took a mortuary to make him feel alive." He speaks kindly to the dead as he stitches together parts of their skulls and dresses them presentably for viewing. “You know how to speak funeral,” he’s told, and when he spots fake morticians at the funeral home, he sees trouble. Nola Brown is a sketch artist whose personality grew a protective shell due to an unusually messed-up childhood. Nola’s mother, Daniella, died, supposedly by suicide, when Nola and her twin brother, Roddy, were 3 years old. But she has Zig’s admiration and gratitude, as she had saved the lives of both Zig’s daughter and Zig himself. But Roddy, now a cop estranged from Nola, believes their mother was murdered by the same person who killed Fechmeier and for the same reason. Nola has no good feelings for Daniella and would as soon forget her. Nola generally walks around feeling pissed, but underneath that hardness is a smart, caring person. There will probably never be an action figure of Zig the amiable mortician who is strangely attracted to pain, because the real energy comes from Nola, who may or may not survive hellacious hand-to-hand combat with a bad guy.

Dark and quirky fun.