POTSHOT

Fourth in the Jack McMorrow series (Lifeline, 1996, etc.), featuring a freelance reporter-cum-gumshoe who's left the New York Times for more mellow pastures in Prosperity, Maine. Jack and his girlfriend Roxanne are visiting a Country Life Fair when counterculturalist homesteader Bobby Mullaney and his sidekick Coyote ask him to sign a petition to decriminalize marijuana. This prompts Jack to get a feature assignment from the Boston Globe on the legalization-of-marijuana movement in Maine, and to visit Bobby at his home in the deep woods. Out there, Jack also meets Bobby's wife Melanie. Bobby and Coyote take Jack far into the woods and show him some magnificent pot plants that they've grown. Then, as Jack writes his feature, Bobby and Coyote disappear in nearby Florence while making a pot delivery. Jack's search takes him and his ex-marine buddy Clair to Valley, a Massachusetts town Bobby and Melanie had fled ten years before when Bobby was arrested for selling coke, became an informer, and got off with short-time. Now Bobby seemingly has gone back into the lion's den, trying to collect for a pot shipment, and has been caught by the gang he earlier informed on. His burnt white van is discovered with a blackened body in it, and dental records say the body is Bobby's. But Jack smells something fishy and pushes his investigation into unexpected waters. Again and again, as all this goes on, Boyle gives us information we already know, but which Jack has to repeat. And he fearlessly spins out long trails of Nick & Nora sitcom chitchat that lighten things between Jack and Roxanne but leave us spinning our wheels. A sporadically entertaining tale if you don't expect too much.