A WELCOME MURDER

In a 180-degree turn from the sorrowful A Brilliant Death (2016), Yocum releases a farcical basket of deplorables in Steubenville, Ohio, and lets them crawl all over each other in search of criminal advantage.

Nobody mourns the passing of Rayce Daubner, shot to death in an isolated park. Not Johnny Earl, the hometown baseball hero he hooked on cocaine and then turned in to the FBI. Not Dena Marie Conchek Androski Xenakis, the homecoming queen who became Rayce’s lover years after Johnny left her behind in his abortive bid for Major League glory. Not Matthew Vincent "Smoochie" Xenakis, Dena Marie’s current husband, a timid social worker who came away with serious damage the one time he confronted Daubner about his adulterous affair. Not Jefferson County Sheriff Francis Delano Roberson, Johnny's high school friend who’s still carrying a torch for Dena Marie even though he’s married to Allison Roberson, chief dispatcher for the sheriff’s office. Not even Alfred Vincenzio, the FBI agent to whom Daubner reported, who’s been out to get Fran Roberson ever since Fran stole Allison away from him at the FBI Academy. But when Vincenzio threatens to shame Fran by snatching the case away from him, it’s clear that somebody’s got to pay, and that’s when two of the suspects reveal hidden depths: Johnny Earl, because he’d rather languish in prison than get released to the tender mercies of his neo-Nazi cellmate, Alaric Himmler, who wants to use the $472,000 in drug money Johnny’s stashed to finance the Aryan Republic of New Germania, and Smoochie Xenakis, who’s determined to make hay out of the idea that he might have had the gumption to kill someone, and might even do it again.

As if the raucous plot isn’t complicated enough, Yocum filters it all through a system of dueling first-person narrators whose perspectives are amusingly at odds with each other to produce a memorably merry tale of murder most richly deserved.