LEATHER MAIDEN

A native has a blood-soaked homecoming.

Cason Statler has been down so long he thinks up is a pipe dream. The job he cared for is gone; a lost love has left him empty and embittered; and he’s been down in the bottle long enough to be much too comfortable there. But now, back in his hometown, he has a shot at redemption through a position on the local newspaper. The eccentric publisher of the Camp Rapture Report, a sleepy East Texas daily, is intrigued enough by his track record to gamble on an ex–big-time newspaperman who almost won a Pulitzer. Promising to get clean and sober, Cason leaves Mrs. Timpson’s office as the paper’s newest columnist. It doesn’t take him long, however, to open Pandora’s box. Six months earlier beautiful Caroline Allison, an exceptionally bright university student without an enemy in the world, had gone missing, her abandoned car found just outside of town. Cason thinks that a series of articles done to a turn might revitalize his once brilliant career. Instead it plunges him into a gory, Gothic netherworld.

An underimagined plot and a hero who’s hard to like may leave fans of Edgar-winner Lansdale (Lost Echoes, 2007, etc.) yearning for those charismatic rascals Collins and Pine.