The Whole Lie

Steve Ulfelder
The Whole Lie

Minotaur, 2012

Conway Sax comes back, this time plunging right into political intrigue. Savannah Kane, Conway's former lover, also a member of Alcoholics Anonymous group who are calling themselves the Barnburners, asks him for help. Savannah has a relationship with a candidate of the upcoming elections for governor. Someone blackmails a candidate for Lieutenant Governor, and Savannah asks to find a blackmailer. Conway is not eager to help some rich politician, but can not refuse Savannah. The Barnburners are on the first place, helping each other, and then only everything and everyone else. Conway receives a check for a lump sum from the candidate, feels something’s wrong, but still takes the case - the money from the check can help Conway buy his business off his girlfiend Charlene. Then someone kills Savannah, staging her death as accident, and to reveal a chain of crimes for Conway becomes a matter of honor.

The first book about Sax offered a twisted plot and believable characters, but suffered from stylistic roughness. In The Whole Lie Steve Ulfelder polished the roughness without losing the suspence of plot and fullness of the characters. Conway Sax in this book has become even more sympathetic to the reader, thanks to the narrator’s talents in Ulfelder. Often crime fiction with an amateur sleuth (and Sax is somewhere in between an amateur and a professional sleuth for AA group) disappoints with its infantilism: the protagonist, having thrown all his usual routine, runs as a madcap, revealing a world conspiracy, putting his life at risk many times in the book as if forgetting the fear. Sax is also engaged in a dangerous game, nevertheless does not become irresponsible. He cares about his business, small problems of Charlene’s daughter, trying to find such middle ground, that his detective affairs doesn’t interfere in affairs of the heart. But it’s hard to carry through.

Ulfelder with this novel definitely will not bore you. The book not only entertains, and even gives practical advice, and it is always useful to read the book from which you learn something new:

«You wouldn't believe how hard it is to tail a guy. It's not like TV at all.

Barnburner duties had taught me the only way to follow a car was to stick your nose right up his back bumper, make sure you got through the same lights he did, and hope like hell he wasn't paying attention.»

Books about Conway Sax are the best there is in the genre today.

Purgatory Chasm

Steve Ufelder
Purgatory Chasm

Minotaur Books, 2011

Former alcoholics have to help each other. This is the motto for Conway Sax, a former alcoholic and drug addict, a former race car driver and now a car mechanic who dreams of his own garage. Conway belongs to the anonymous group Barnburners: if one Barnburner is in trouble, the other Barnburner has to come to the rescue. So Tander Phigg, the son of the late local magnate, comes to Conway for help. Phigg’s given his car to be repaired to a body shop, but it's been a few months, but there is no result – a vintage Mercedes is still in the body shop. Phigg asks Conway to return to him the car and the money given for the job.

But after the first visit to the body shop Conway stumbles upon a surly owner, and gets a blow to the head with something heavy. Phigg soon is found hanged in his shack, but Conway won’t stop until he finds out what's what. Even dead Barnburners need help.

Sax is an unexpected hybrid of amateur detective and a private investigator with the profession of a mechanic. Sax is not the smartest of the detectives in the world literature: he knows how to survive on the street, but may not know a particular word or its pronunciation. The guy is just a mechanic trying to build a family and start his own business. Selecting such a narrator, not the brightest head, Steve Ufelder tricks the reader making one believe as if the author himself is not smart. And former profession of the narrator, race car driver, even hints that there will not be any investigation, and all will come down to race at high speeds and fist fights.

After leading the reader by the nose for half a novel, Ufelder gradually pulls rabbits from the hat - one by one. Multiple story lines begin to connect into one, the number of twists is growing exponentially, and the finale in general leads to believe that the mechanics are the most insightful people on earth.

In addition to entertaining plot, Ufelder catches a wave which a little town lives on, where the events of the book take place. And the little people are capable of great crimes.

Purgatory Chasm has a few stylistic imperfections, not including typos. For example, Ufelder clunky switches from the dialogue to the first person narration. This is evident in the dialogues Sax has with new characters Sachs had just met and who share their life stories. Ufelder does not let a character to speak out, replacing character words with Sax’s. And it looks, as if Sax reads dossier of one or another character from a sheet of paper.

Purgatory Chasm is able to pleasantly surprise. Isn’t it what we expect from literature - to surprise us?

A Bad Day for Sorry

Sophie Littlefield
A Bad Day for Sorry

Minotaur, 2009

Stella Hardesty is already over fifty and she is a widow. Stella killed her husband, once struck him on the head. Ollie, a husband, constantly drank and beat Stella up, but one day her patience came to an end. Stella didn’t go to prison, and to deal with husbands Hardesty made her profession. On weekdays, Stella keeps sewing shop, and she does freelance jobs on the weekends. Clients, women from the neighborhood, complain to Stella about their husbands or boyfriends if those use their fists , and Stella has serious conversations with ne’er-do-well husbands, explaining why it is not good, to beat and mock their own wives. If husbands do not heed verbal warnings, Stella with fists and other punishment tools hammers in negligent men lesson of obedience. Typically it helps. That is just business.

One client of Stella, a young mother Chrissy Shaw, however, is faced with the situation that is more complicated: her brute husband Roy Dean did not let up after numerous warnings and kidnapped Chrisy’s young son Tucker. Stella needs as soon as possible to find the boy and his kidnapper who are in trouble with the law, and apparently even made friends with the local mob.

Stella Hardesty is a breath of fresh air after a homogeneous mass of similar heroines of semi-criminal novels written by women. Stella is far from the typical heroine of today's women's environment: she is not young, does not wear a short skirt and high heels, is able to handle a weapon, and her main occupation is not sitting in the office where the nearest to a crime that can happen is if someone throws on someone a glass of water at the cooler.

Stella doesn’t have time to sit on her bum, she works two jobs, and not for the sake of money, she doesn’t have a plentiful of children: the one and only daughter does not talk to her mother after Stella chastised her for shacking up with an ex-con. Hardesty is trying for a universal, and especially a woman's, justice.

«Early in her justice-delivering career, the thought of being suspected of favoring kinky sexual practices was intensely embarrassing, especially since the source of the rumors came about for only the most practical reasons. Being five feet six, overweight, and out of shape, Stella had managed to pull a muscle in her lower back the first time she tied up a recalcitrant jerk at gunpoint. She almost shot him by accident as she staggered around, yelping in pain. There was also the fact that the knot-tying skills she learned in Girl Scouts weren't up to the task: the same guy, as Stella waved the gun around wildly, managed to get his wrists free. It was only slightly reassuring that he immediately fell over as he tried to run away, having forgotten that his ankles were still bound.

Stella realized she had to make some changes. She started a fitness program, but she knew she also needed to find a more reliable way to subdue a man. She had a vague notion of learning some paramilitary restraint techniques that might rely more on finesse than brute force, but Google searches for words like restraint and shackle kept popping up bondage sites.»

A Bad Day for Sorry is the first book in the series, with a touch of pulp fiction and lively plot, flavored with salty language and like running-into-the-problems style.