THE WALKAWAY

Phillips returns to Wichita, Kansas, the scene of the darkly hilarious crimes of The Ice Harvest (2000), to spin out undreamed-of details of what happened long before and long after.

Things have changed for retired cop Gunther Fahnstiel since the night of New Year’s Eve 1978, when he popped up in The Ice Harvest’s finale as the dimwit ex-machina who ended feckless attorney Charlie Arglist’s equally inept crime spree when he and his wife Dot accidentally backed their RV over him. Ten years after struggling with an equally refractory backhoe to bury Charlie’s body in Lester Carswell’s quarry, Gunther’s gone AWOL from the Lake Vista Elder Care Facility in search of the money he found in Charlie’s car and stashed somewhere or other. The news of addled Gunther’s escape draws an unlikely crew of pursuers and investigators to his trail: Ed Dieterle, a retired fellow officer who high-tails it up from Dallas; Gunther’s stepson Sidney McCallum, the bouncer who now runs local strip joint the Sweet Cage; Gunther’s ex-lover Loretta Gandy, who’s hiding a criminal secret of her own; and Dot, still fearful that the cops will get a line on Charlie’s money. A long, looping series of flashbacks to 1952 suggests that Dot’s fears are groundless because there are enough unsolved (often unsuspected) local felonies stretched out to the distant past as far as the eye can see to keep the searchers busy for another three or four volumes—assuming, of course, that the searchers, walkaways all, weren’t too interested in getting drunk and laid ever to find out the truth about anything in Phillips’s topsy-turvy world.

The expansive story, which substitutes dozens of subplots for the irresistible momentum of The Ice Harvest, couldn’t be more different from the chilly anecdote to which it serves as both prequel and sequel. After such a pair of tours de force, it’s hard to imagine what Phillips will come up with next.