STILL LIFE
by Rick Hanson
Weird is the word for what happens to cop-turned-sculptor Adam McCleet (Mortal Remains, 1995, etc.) when Alison Brooks, the Portland gallery owner who admires his body of work as much as he admires her body, drags him down to Taos for a show. When inoffensive Dental Stoker, the man who gives them directions to Adam's sister Margot's ranch, is murdered under Adam's nose, Sheriff Shirley Gomez-Gomez arrests Adam—along with Dental's son and his wife, a former rock singer, a Swedish physicist with a fixation on a luminescent alien, and his aspiring son-in-law, Dustin. The mystery will lead Adam and the other suspects—each as brightly colored and thin as a paper doll—to rattlesnakes, New Age nudists, and the inevitably anticlimactic alien remains. Hanson's obvious geniality makes this installment as easy to take—and as hard to remember—as his first two.