FLAT CRAZY

Erring two-legged animals give Game Warden John Marlin sleepless nights.

Consider, for example, Duke Waldrip, the accidental murderer. Most people who know him at all would recognize him as a crook, con man, and natural rogue. But a murderer? All Duke ever killed, they’d tell you, is his share of white-tailed deer out of season. Big deal, since poaching is Texas’s equivalent to jaywalking in New York City. And yet Oliver Searcy is certainly dead. And it’s equally true that Duke wielded the screwdriver that settled deep in Searcy’s neck. But it was an accident, and Duke would have told the world if he thought anyone in it would believe a person with his reputation for shading the truth. In the meantime, the game warden is being bedeviled by chupacabra sightings. No one knows exactly what a chupacabra is because no one reliable has actually seen one. Whatever it is, Marlin finds himself coping with a horde of trespassing, chupacabra-hunting outlanders. That problem, however, turns out to have an upside in the fetching person of TV reporter Rudy Vee. How Duke Waldrip hooks into the chupacabra and John hooks up with Rudy is the burden of another of Rehder’s relentlessly twisted tales (Bone Dry, 2003, etc.).

Outrageous fun, and withal a tightly plotted police procedural.