V. C. CLINTON-BADDELEY – Only a Matter of Time.

Dell, paperback reprint; 1st printing, July 1981; Murder Ink Mystery #23. Hardcover edition: William Morrow, 1970. Prior UK edition: Victor Gollancz, hc, 1969; pb reprint: Arrow, 1974.

   Not knowing very much about the author, and assuming that perhaps that you don’t either, I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing the autobiographical blurb that was included at the end of this book:

   This explains a lot, and I’ll get to that in a moment. His full name, according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, was V(ictor Vaughan Reynolds Geraint) C(linton) Clinton-Baddeley, 1900-1970, and his mystery writing career consisted of five detective stories that came out between 1967 and 1972, all featuring Dr. R. V. Davie as his continuing series character. (I’ll list the five books at the end of this review.)

   But what struck me when I was reading Only a Matter of Time was how erudite both the author and his sleuth were, and the brief biographical notes above only confirmed my thoughts. Not in a snobbish way, though. Not at all. The author has a dry if not wry sense of humor that had me smiling if not laughing throughout.

   The novel takes place in a small town called King’s Lacy during a week in the summer when a week-long classical music festival is going on.

   The town also has a multitude of antique and small curio shops, and every so often the murder investigation stops and we (the reader) are treated to a knowledgeable discussion involving something to do with the fine arts. Either major or minor tidbits of information, it doesn’t matter, they’re still a treat.

   There is a slow, leisurely pace to this novel. I mentioned a murder investigation, but the first death is not known until the book is half over, although the victim had disappeared some time before that. Dr. Davie cooperates with the police, but since the second victim was known to him, that is his only rationale for continuing to stay involved.

   As the title suggests, you might be wise to keep close tabs on the timing of events, including watches that stop or run erratically and a church bell that does not chime overnight.

   One definition of a cozy mystery is perhaps one in which no commotion occurs when the murder does, and if so, that makes Only a Matter of Time the perfect example of a cozy mystery. The festival is not canceled, the show goes on, and Dr. Davie continues to take his afternoon nap, right on schedule.

   Overall, then? If you don’t mind leisurely, discursive detective novels with plenty of clues and false leads, this is the perfect one for you to try on for size the next time you’re looking for a book precisely like this one to read.

V. C. CLINTON-BADDELEY. Dr. Davie in all. First UK editions only:

      Death’s Bright Dart (n.) Gollancz 1967.

      My Foe Outstretch�d Beneath the Tree (n.) Gollancz 1968.

      Only a Matter of Time (n.) Gollancz 1969.
      No Case for the Police (n.) Gollancz 1970.
      To Study a Long Silence (n.) Gollancz 1972.

HUGH AUSTIN – The Milkmaid’s Millions. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1948.

   This is the second and apparently last in the “Sultan’s Harem” mysteries. The Sultan is Wm (that’s the way he spells it) Sultan, the only surviving member of Sultan, Sultan & Sultan, counselors at law.

   Wm is thirty-five years old, but talks and thinks as if he were in his seventies. His staff, all female and thus “the harem,” treats him as if he were their grandfather, though his secretary appears to regard him as a possible swain.

   Wm’s main interest in life is compiling his late uncle’s “Life & Letters.” His staff is typing up the forty-second chapter of the second volume, which seems to comprise the twenty-seven thank-you letters the uncle sent for presents received on his fourteenth birthday.

   One shudders to think what the other forty-one chapters in volume two might consist of, and volume one doesn’t bear thinking about at all.

   One of Wm’s few clients has prepared a codicil to his will, having recently discovered a direct descendant, and Wm is called upon to prove the bona fides of the new family member. Shortly after Wm arrives at the client’s home, however, the testator is murdered.

   The investigators think that Wm did it, evidence arises that Wm probably didn’t do it, and then new developments seem to demonstrate that he did indeed do it.

   Wm’s harem, who were responsible for his getting involved in the mess, arrives on the scene to vamp some of the suspects and rig some evidence so that Wm will not be convicted of the crime. Those who enjoy the pedantic and stuffy, mixed with the preposterous, will find this novel delightful. The crime’s rather good, too.

   Bibliographic Data. [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.] —

         AUSTIN, HUGH. Pseudonym of Hugh Austin Evans.

    It Couldn’t Be Murder (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Peter Quint]
    Murder in Triplicate (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Peter Quint]
    Murder of a Matriarch (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Peter Quint]
    The Upside Down Murders (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Peter Quint]
    The Cock’s Tail Murder (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Peter Quint]

    Lilies for Madame (n.) Doubleday 1938.
    Drink the Green Water (n.) Scribner 1948 [Wm Sultan (Sultan’s Harem)]
    The Milkmaid’s Millions (n.) Scribner 1948 [Wm Sultan (Sultan’s Harem)]
    Death Has Seven Faces (n.) Scribner 1949.

   Peter Quint was a lieutenant in the New York City police department. The small cover image of The Cock’s Tail Murder seen above (by Artzybasheff) is the only one of Austin’s books that I’ve been able to come up with so far in jacket. No other information about the author, other than his real name, seems to be known.

[UPDATE] Later the same day.   British bookseller Jamie Sturgeon has just supplied me with another cover, this one for The Upside Down Murders. It came from a Grosset reprint, but both he and I believe it to be the same as the Crime Club edition. Art by Duggaru:

[UPDATE #2] 10-26-09.   Thanks to the combined efforts of Victor Berch, Jamie Sturgeon and Al Hubin — and Google! — it has been learned that Hugh Austin Evans was born in 1903 and died in 1964.

LAURENCE GOUGH – Serious Crimes.

Viking Press, US/Canada; hardcover, 1990. Paperback reprint: Penguin, Canada, 1991. British editions: Gollancz, hc, 1990; pb, 1992 (shown).

   As far as police procedurals go, if they’re published in Canada by a Canadian author, not to mention ones that take place in Vancouver, BC, they might as well have never been written at all, as far as American readers are concerned. Generally speaking, of course.

   Which is not to say that none of Laurence Gough’s thirteen books in his “Willows and Parker” series have not been published in the US, but most of them haven’t, or if they have, it was barely.

   Take the test for yourself (assuming you live in the US). Take a look at the thirteen books below, for some of which the covers have been provided, and see how many of them you recognize. An easier test: Raise your right hand if you’ve heard of Laurence Gough. I hope you have, but I have a feeling that he’s all but unknown in this country.

   There is a little bit of soap opera going on along with the cases that Jack Willows and his partner Claire Parker are assigned to. Just how much, I couldn’t tell you, as this is the first one of them I’ve happened to read. But in the opening few chapters of Serious Crimes, Willows’ wife has left him, along with their two kids, and he’s getting ready to sell his house.

   There is something going on, I think, between him and Parker, but if it is, it’s awfully subtle and/or it simply doesn’t come up this time. A little investigation on my part has revealed, however, that things heat up in the books that follow. Parker, by the way, is all but completely invisible in this book. She’s always around whenever Willows is; other cops look at her when she’s with Willows with ogling eyes, and that’s about it. Tune in for more next time, or so it appears.

   Dead is a local Chinese businessman, found frozen in a pond covered with several layers of ice. A botched kidnaping? It looks like it. Interspersed with the two cops’ investigation are the adventures of two young hoodlums, one of whom falls in lust with one of his victims, a bored housewife who seems (unknown to him) to have similar feelings about her attacker.

   There’s not much in the way of detection involved, which is par for the course as far as work of most homicide cops is concerned. But the tale the author weaves is as gripping as it is understated, as paradoxical as that may sound. The case (or cases) are never boring, and more, at least one of them ends in a blazing hell-raiser of a finale.

      The Willows and Parker series —

    1. The Goldfish Bowl (1987)

    2. Death on a No. 8 Hook (1988)
    3. Hot Shots (1989)
    4. Serious Crimes (1990)
    5. Accidental Deaths (1991)

    6. Fall Down Easy (1992)
    7. Killers (1993)
    8. Heartbreaker (1995)

    9. Memory Lane (1996)
   10. Karaoke Rap (1997)

   11. Shutterbug (1998)
   12. Funny Money (2000)
   13. Cloud of Suspects (2003)

MARK GATISS – The Vesuvius Club: A Bit of Fluff. Simon & Schuster, UK, hardcover, November 2004; Scribner’s; US, trade pb, October 2005.

   So speaks Lucifer Box (“I have a horror of artichokes.”), Edwardian portraitist, and His Majesty’s most daring — and decadent — secret agent, spy, and when the need arises, assassin, the hero of Mark Gatiss’s novel of mystery, conspiracy, dirty doings, and — of course a threat to the future of the Western world and particularly the waning sun of the British Empire post Victoria.

   Box, who lives at Number 9 Downing Street (because somebody has to), has been assigned to find the missing agent Jocelyn Utterson Poop aided by his hench-woman and nude model Delilah, who has just helped him dispose of his late luncheon guest Everard Supple, a treasonous diplomat:

   The decidedly bi-sexual Box is dispatched by his chief (Joshua Reynolds, a dwarf who gives out his assignments from a bathroom, “Three foot something in his stocking feet and ever so jolly.”) to a case involving the beautiful Miss Bella Pok, his boy assistant handsome Charlie Jackson, and the grizzled vulcanologist Emmanuel Quibble, as well as poisoned centipedes, foggy London chases, kidnapped scientists, and a plot to set off Mount Vesuvius by a Neapolitan secret criminal society.

   It’s a wild chase, equal parts Oscar Wilde, Fu Manchu, H.P. Lovecraft,. Monty Python, The Avengers, James Bond, and Austin Powers. The tale is spun by Gatiss, an award winning star and co-creator of the British comedy, The League of Gentlemen and sometime writer for Doctor Who, in a perfectly toned voice that sparkles with witty epigrams and playful adventure.

   Of course you may find Lucifer Box a bit of a scoundrel, but his raffish adventures among the seedier side of the Edwardian demimonde are outlandishly entertaining and addictive.

   There is even a twist in the tale of near poetic justice for our hero. Which of course he escapes — you can’t very well succumb in the first book in a series. Simply bad taste, that.

   And you’ll be smiling too, though perhaps not as dashed devilishly. A tasty and charming bit of fluff, exactly the thing for a cold winter’s night.

       The Lucifer Box series —

    1. The Vesuvius Club (2004)
    2. The Devil in Amber (2006)
    3. Black Butterfly (2008)

LISA LUTZ – The Spellman Files. Simon & Schuster, hardcover; First Edition: March 2007. Trade paperback: February 2008. Mass market pb: Pocket, January 2009.

   This darkly humorous series debut is told in the first person from the point of view of Isabel Spellman, a P.I. in her family’s San Francisco firm.

   The organization of this book is a post-modern revelation. Ostensibly it’s a series of reports in the case file that Isabel produces as she’s trying to track down her missing 14-year-old sister Rae, who is already skilled in certain investigative techniques.

   In the process, a cold case from her parents’ archives also comes into play. There are sections and subdivisions, rather than traditional chapters. The text utilizes footnotes, varying type fonts, and passages of script-like dialogue.

   This organized chaos accurately maps Isabel’s character — as an investigator, she’s trained to record everything, and she does so obsessively, in part because she’s a bit of a basket case. A fantastic academic challenge would be to try to outline the various chunks of the novel; I may yet try to do this.

   Have I mentioned this book is very funny? Although the 14-year-old has disappeared, no kidnap is involved. In the end, it’s not a traditional crime novel at all; it’s a portrait of a very quirky family, as seen by its most messed-up member.

       The Spellman series —

    1. The Spellman Files (2007)
    2. Curse of the Spellmans (2008)
    3. Revenge of the Spellmans (2009)

    4. The Spellmans Strike Again (March 2010)

ROBERT GREER – The Devil’s Hatband. Frog Books, trade paperback, September 2004. Originally published by Mysterious Press, hardcover: March 1996; paperback: March 1997.

   CJ Floyd, a Denver African-American bail bondsman, is also a bounty hunter who goes after bondskippers, but the job he takes on in this first of a series is something quite different, the search for the missing daughter of a black federal judge.

   According to two men to who show up in CJ’s office, Brenda Mathison had joined the Grand River Tribe, a splinter group of what the two men call a “loony” environmental organization, PlanetFirst, then disappeared with a document that belonged to the men’s employer, Carson Technologies, a veterinary research organization.

   Something seems fishy to CJ, but with a sizable bonus promised if she’s found and the document returned within 30 days, he’s willing to take on the job.

   When CJ heads into the back country where Brenda was last known to be living, he finds that somebody else has already found her, a sheriff who’s discovered her body.

   As CJ continues his investigation of what has become an even more sensitive case, he learns that the Grand River Tribe is planning to destroy the Western cattle industry, and the connection with on Technologies involves a deadly virus that can wipe out not only a good portion of the cattle industry but untold numbers of people as well.

   This tense techno-thriller shifts back and forth between the search for the murderer or murderers of Brenda and an attempt to thwart the terrorist attack, CJ’s business in Denver, his ties to the black community, his uneasy alliance with the other bail bondsmen, and a threat posed by a local gangleader who has it in for him.

   CJ is also a collector, most notably of vintage license plates (hence, I suppose, the introduction by bookman and mystery writer Dunning for the Frog edition), and the narrative pace moves at times with gut-wrenching speed, then slows down for a more leisurely take on aspects of CJ’s life that have no direct connection with the Mathison case.

   CJ Floyd is one of the best-drawn and most interesting fictional characters I’ve come across recently, one that I hope to spend more time with in the future.

       The CJ Floyd series —

1. The Devil’s Hatband (1996)
2. The Devil’s Red Nickel (1997)

3. The Devil’s Backbone (1998)
4. Resurrecting Langston Blue (2005)

5. The Fourth Perspective (2006)
6. The Mongoose Deception (2007)

7. Blackbird, Farewell (2008)

R. D. [RODNEY] WINGFIELD – Frost at Christmas. PaperJacks, Canada, paperback original, 1984; 2nd printing, 1987. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1989. Bantam, US, pb, 1995.

   For a lover of detective stories I have to admit that I haven’t kept up with present day (or, at any rate, fairly recent) authors. This is not a plan, but a function of a slow reading rate and other things demanding attention.

   I have confessed several times to a close friend about not reading Wingfield, and he has always told me that I should. Of course I have watched and enjoyed all the episodes of the TV series but was aware that that series was not favoured by the author himself.

   I actually bought this paperback edition for 10 cents at Haslam’s bookstore in St Petersburg, Florida, on a visit in the early 1990s and finally I’ve read it.

   When the smoothly efficient Inspector Allen is taken ill, Frost has to take on the search for a missing 8-year-old girl, and his investigation keeps blundering into other cases, including a 32-year-old case of the murder of a bank worker and a missing £20.000.

   The story is told is short pithy passages and often from the viewpoint of Detective Constable Clive Barnard, the Chief Constable’s nephew who had been assigned to Denton C.I.D. for his first appointment and was accompanying Frost in his investigations.

   I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book for a while and the first 100 pages shot by. After that, familiarity maybe set in for a while, but I still happily turned the pages, though without quite the same eagerness, until the end, 184 pages later. Still, overall it was an enjoyable read, and I will look out for a cheap copy of the second in the series, A Touch of Frost.

      The Detective Inspector Jack Edward Frost series —

    Frost at Christmas (1984)
    A Touch of Frost (1987)
    Night Frost (1992)
    Hard Frost (1995)
    Winter Frost (1999)
    A Killing Frost (2008)

STUART KAMINSKY – Murder on the Yellow Brick Road. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1977. Paperback reprints include: Penguin, 1979; Ibooks, 2000.

   Stuart Kaminsky is a film writer and critic as well as a mystery novelist, and he has put his expertise to good use in his series about 1940s Hollywood private eye Toby Peters.

   The novels are a blend of fact and fiction — that is, of real Hollywood personalities (now deceased) and fictional characters.

   Peters, investigator for the stars, is wise to the ways of Hollywood; he shares an office with a dentist, Shelley Minck, who provides much of the comic relief in these books; he eats abominably — burgers, Pepsis, milk shakes; he lives in “one of a series of two-room, one story wooden structures L.A. management people called bungalows”; and he has a running feud with his brother, Homicide Lieutenant Phil Pevsner (the real family name).

   Murder on the Yellow Brick Road concerns the stabbing of a munchkin — one of L.A.’s many “little people” (they prefer that label to that of midget) — on the set on which The Wizard of Oz was filmed.

   Judy Garland finds the body and calls Peters in a panic. Peters goes to MGM, where he meets Miss Garland, PR man Warren Hoff, Garland’s costume designer friend Cassie James, and Louis B. Mayer himself. Mayer hires Peters to conduct an investigation and divert any adverse publicity.

   What follows is an entertaining story of Hollywood in its heyday, the inner workings of the film community, and the brotherhood of the “little people.” Peters meets such luminaries as Raymond Chandler, and pays a visit to Clark Gable at William Randolph Hearst’s fabled San Simeon.

   Kaminsky does a good job of evoking both Hollywood of the Forties and the personalities of the various stars; his portrayal of the child/woman Garland is especially good.

   Other Toby Peters novels include Never Cross a Vampire (1980), which features Bela Lugosi and William Faulkner in his screen-writing days; and He Done Her Wrong (1983), in which Mae West calls on Peters to find her missing, sizzling autobiography; and Down For the Count (1985), which features fighter Joe Louis.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

STUART KAMINSKY, R.I.P. According to his obituary in the Chicago Tribune, Stuart Kaminsky “died of complications from hepatitis and a recent stroke Friday, Oct. 9, in Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis […] He was an Army medic in the 1950s, when his family believes he got hepatitis C.” He was 75 at the time of his death.

   Unusual for most mystery writers, Kaminsky was the creator of four distinctive series characters. Besides 1940s Hollywood PI Toby Peters, who appeared in 24 novels [see below] in which he rubbed shoulders with many movie stars of the day, Kaminsky also chronicled the adventures of (quoting again from the Tribune) “… Porfiry Rostnikov, a police inspector in Moscow [16 novels]; Abe Lieberman, a crusty but wise Chicago cop who works the streets with his younger partner, Bill Hanrahan [10 novels]; and Lew Fonesca, a former Cook County state’s attorney investigator now operating as a cut-rate private eye in Sarasota [6 novels].”

   Kaminsky also wrote two novelizations of the TV series The Rockford Files, three novelizations of CSI: New York, two stand-alone suspense novels, three story collections, and was the editor of two recent crime fiction anthologies.

   Without much fanfare, Stuart Kaminksy was without a doubt one of the more prolific mystery authors of recent years. He was a quiet giant in our field.

      The Toby Peters series —

1. Bullet for A Star (1977)

2. Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (1977)
3. You Bet Your Life (1978)
4. The Howard Hughes Affair (1979)
5. Never Cross a Vampire (1980)
6. High Midnight (1981)
7. Catch A Falling Clown (1981)

8. He Done Her Wrong (1983)
9. The Fala Factor (1984)

10. Down for the Count (1985)
11. The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (1986)
12. Smart Moves (1986)
13. Think Fast, Mr. Peters (1987)
14. Buried Caesars (1989)

15. Poor Butterfly (1990)
16. The Melting Clock (1991)

17. The Devil Met A Lady (1993)
18. Tomorrow is Another Day (1995)
19. Dancing in the Dark (1996)
20. A Fatal Glass of Beer (1997)

21. A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2001)
22. To Catch a Spy (2002)
23. Mildred Pierced (2003)
24. Now You See It (2004)

BARTHOLOMEW GILL – McGarr on the Cliffs of Moher. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1978. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1980. US paperback reprint: Penguin, 1982; reprinted as The Death of an Irish Lass: Avon, pb, 2003.

   Quite remarkably, when three young people from the same small village in County Clare, Ireland, come to New York City, they find nearly equal amounts of success. When it happens that they all return home at the same time, their troubles and their angers are brought with them, and one of them, the girl reporter after the truth about the IRA, dies, having been stabbed to death with a pitchfork at a lovely spot overlooking the sea.

   McGarr is Ireland’s top cop. Why he’s on this case from the beginning is never made clear. And with background of this sort assumed and never properly filled in, and with the failure of McGarr to investigate immediately the questions the reader wants asked (well, the ones I did), it’s no wonder that my mind wandered, having distinctly gotten the feeling that the mystery was only incidental.

   What we do have is a very Irish, very picturesque novel about the problems troubling Ireland today. As a worthy reflection on the objectives that the IRA should have (and doesn’t), you probably cannot do better. I wish that I had found it more interesting, but I am nearly ashamed to say that I did not.

[UPDATE] 10-05-09. It isn’t fair, I know, but on the basis of reading only the one book by Gill, it remains the only one I’ve read. He wrote a few of them over the years, and I’ll submit to you a list below. If I were to read another, which should it be?

       The Peter McGarr series, by Bartholomew Gill ––

1. McGarr and the Politician’s Wife (1977) aka The Death of an Irish Politician

2. McGarr and the Sienese Conspiracy (1977) aka The Death of an Irish Consul
3. McGarr and the Cliffs of Moher (1978) aka The Death of an Irish Lass

4. McGarr and the Dublin Horse Show (1979) aka The Death of an Irish Tradition
5. McGarr and the P.M. of Belgrave Square (1983)

6. McGarr and the Method of Descartes (1984)
7. McGarr and the Legacy of a Woman Scorned (1986)
8. The Death of A Joyce Scholar (1989)
9. The Death of Love (1992)
10. Death on A Cold, Wild River (1993)

11. The Death of An Ardent Bibliophile (1995)
12. The Death of An Irish Sea Wolf (1996)
13. The Death of An Irish Tinker (1997) aka Death of a Busker King
14. Death of An Irish Lover (2000)
15. Death of An Irish Sinner (2001)
16. Death in Dublin (2002)

DEAN OWEN – Juice Town.   Monarch 290; paperback original; first printing, December 1962. Cover art by Rafael M. deSoto.

   Over the years that he was writing, Dean Owen (born Dudley Dean McGaughey, 1909-1986) was perhaps better recognized for his westerns than for his crime fiction, but at the present time I doubt that he’s a well-known name in either field — except to regular readers of this blog, of course.

   If you follow the link that follows, though, you’ll find a fairly lengthy and what I hope is a complete checklist of all the fiction he wrote, starting out in the pulps, then moving on to writing paperback originals almost exclusively.

   Of the books already listed in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, I’ve found two errors. First of all, Juice Town is listed as only a marginal entry. Not so, as you will see in a minute. And A Killer’s Bargain (Hillman, pbo, 1960) is included, and I don’t believe it should be. From all I can tell without having it in hand, it’s a western, with no more crime elements than almost any other western has.

   And of the “sleaze” books Dean wrote, some may have definite crime elements, but while they’re included in the checklist, I don’t own any of them, so someone else will have to report in on those. (And in fact, two of the hard-to-find digests Owen wrote as Hodge Evens have since been confirmed as having substantial crime content.)

   It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book like this one. It starts out really, really tough and doesn’t let up until it’s over. It doesn’t matter too much if it’s also only a song with only one note. The one note is like a small incessant drumming in the background that just doesn’t go away until the book is finished.

   In a sense (speaking of westerns) this is a western in theme, at least, if not in reality. One guy in a white hat comes to town and cleans it up, one guy against the mob, one guy who’s left himself vulnerable with a wife and kids, but he does his job anyway.

   The guy in this book is Del Painter. Out of a job and looking for work – there’s a story behind that as well – he is persuaded to return to his home town of Southbay, California, and to join the same police department that he was so proud his Uncle Ray, now deceased, was a member of for so long.

   Little does Del know that his uncle was a crook, that the entire police department is crooked (and rather openly so), and that he on his first day on the job is expected to be a crook as well. Juice, in the sense of the title, means protection, as it is carefully explained to Del on page 34, and the police in Southbay make out very well, including the use of the services of the local ladies of the evening whenever they feel they have a need for them.

   Del has a hard head, though, and hard heads make for harder enemies in towns like this. He does make a few friends, however, although it difficult to tell at times – well, most of the time – on which side some of the friends are.

   Only 144 pages long, this book can be read in only one evening, and probably in only one sitting.

   And even though several weeks later you are probably not very likely to remember much of the details of what is admittedly a rather minor effort, this vividly jagged portrayal of a town with such a blatant disregard of the law may stick with you a whole lot longer than you think it will, when you’re done with it.