SMOKE

This fifth outing for unlicensed private investigator Isaiah Quintabe is all over the California map.

Learning that he’s being hunted by paroled hit man Magnus Vestergard, aka Skip Hanson, IQ decides he’s had enough of criminal investigation. Abandoning his partner, painter Grace, he high-tails it out of Long Beach and ends up in Coronado Springs, where he rents a place and waits for the clouds to pass by. But his new home is even more crime-ridden than his old. Billy Sorensen, who’s escaped from a psychiatric institute, breaks into Isaiah’s house in search of food that can sustain him while he looks for Ava Bouchard, the sympathetic friend whose twin sister, Hannah, was killed by AMSAK, a serial murderer who earned his name by dumping the bodies of 17 women near the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers. AMSAK, it turns out, is still very much in the picture—but he’ll have to compete for attention with Grace’s friend Deronda, a food-truck empress whose long-ago one-night stand, Wells Fargo banker Bobby James, demands half her business as the price of not pursuing joint custody of their 4-year-old son, and with Isaiah’s own criminal friend Juanell Dodson, whose unpaid internship in an advertising agency, a position he never sought, will uncover unsuspected depths in both the agency and himself. The criminal plot is a violent, overgalvanized shambles; the main attraction here is the racially inclusive three-ring circus Ide organizes around it in a series of overlapping, endlessly expanding circles.

Overstuffed, riotous, and exhausting in both good ways and bad.