THE WHISKEY BARREL MURDER

In Hester’s (The Bottoms Up Murder, 2013) second Jonas Lauer mystery, a skeleton in a whiskey barrel brews up trouble for the sheriff of Monroe County, Tennessee.

It’s rarely good news when the phone rings in the middle of the night; it’s no exception when Sheriff Lauer takes a post-midnight call at the start of this tale of Southern-style homicide. A park ranger has found a skeleton in a Jack Daniels barrel, buried under some Bradford pear trees. When Lauer investigates the next day, he finds that the barrel also contains a moneybag. He thinks it could be from the now-shuttered Monroe County Bank, which was notoriously held up 44 years ago by local robber Gale Marlowe, who took off in a biplane that was waiting for him at the county airport and was never seen again. Could this skeleton be his? Assisting Lauer are forensic lab supervisor Molly Newman, medical examiner Karen Long, and former county sheriff Bill Hays, who was incarcerated a few years back for killing his wife and her lover. But identifying the bones isn’t Lauer’s only problem: A ranting sexagenarian wants him to give her husband a lie-detector test to see if he’s having an affair with a former porn star; members of a militia are in town, for reasons undetermined; and even Lauer’s girlfriend’s ex pops up. Hester has a nice ear for dialogue (“[H]e died of a heart attack. Shoot that was no surprise there, the man had bacon with about every meal he ate”) and a sharp way of making a point (“Teeth don’t lie”). Overall, his characters and scenes seem authentic, from shootouts to wake-up sex. Occasionally, however, commas are distractingly missing, and the descriptions, while generally strong, can be overdone; for example, there’s no need to describe the color of every character’s eyes, be they “cobalt,” “doe brown,” “emerald” or hazel “that went elliptical.”

A largely enjoyable mystery that barrels toward an unexpected climax.