BLOOD AND LEMONADE

Name: BLOOD AND LEMONADE
Author: Joe R. Lansdale
ISBN: 978-1-61696-253-1

by Joe R. Lansdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2017

The emphasis on prequels to the partnership subordinates the trademark dialogue between Hap and Leonard, who doesn’t even...

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This companion volume to the second season of the Hap and Leonard TV series includes 14 flashbacks to the iconic Texas partners’ youth, eight of them new to print.

Most of the stories land working-class white Hap Collins in fights, and even before he first meets his gay black soul mate, Leonard Pine, when they’re both 17—a meeting chronicled in “Tire Fire”—most of the fights are about race. In the reprints, Hap turns on a school bully with the approval of his principal in “Parable of the Stick,” echoing his father’s legally sanctioned thrashing of the nonpaying customer who threatens him in “Apollo Red”; he declines to take part in a gang-not-quite-rape in the surprisingly delicate “Short Night,” witnesses the dark sequel to another school kid’s bullying in “The Boy Who Became Invisible,” accepts the help of Leonard’s uncle in still another fight in “Not Our Kind”—both of these last two familiar from Hap and Leonard (2016)—and bids an elegiac farewell to the world of his youth in the plotless envoi “The Oak and the Pond.” Hap’s father also takes featured roles in “Coach Whip,” in which he moralizes over Hap’s mother’s killing of a harmless snake; “The Bottom of the World,” in which he fulfills his young son’s request for a scary story in a touchingly comforting way; and “Squirrel Hunt,” in which he covers up the murder of a man who richly deserved it. The best of the new stories are “Stopping for Coffee,” in which a black man whose family is refused service at a roadside cafe finds unexpected allies and enemies; “In the River of the Dead,” in which drug dealers press Hap and Leonard into service diving to recover a chest full of stolen drugs lost among three family members they’ve shot to death; and “Blood and Lemonade,” in which Hap’s mother can’t resist some overexplicit preaching over an otherwise affecting episode in which she briefly takes home a forsaken black child only to be rebuffed by his mother.

The emphasis on prequels to the partnership subordinates the trademark dialogue between Hap and Leonard, who doesn’t even appear in half these stories, to self-serious moralizing over individually effective but highly repetitious tales.

Pub Date: March 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-61696-253-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Tachyon

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

Categories:

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THINGS GET UGLY
by Joe R. Lansdale

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THE DONUT LEGION
by Joe R. Lansdale

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OF MICE AND MINESTRONE
by Joe R. Lansdale

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

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BADLANDS

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

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Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.