REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:

   

ROBERT O. GREER – The Devil’s Hatband. CJ Floyd #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996; paperback, 1997.

   This is a first novel by an author described as “doctor,  scientist, cattle rancher, and editor.” I make the maybe unwarranted assumption that he’s black.

   His protagonist, CJ Floyd, is, anyway. CJ is in his forties, a Viet Nam vet who is now a bail bondsman and part-time bounty hunter in Denver. Two black corporate types want him to find the daughter of a black judge who happens to be on the board of a big-time biotech corporation — the one they work for — and in the process retrieve some unspecified but important papers she stole.

   He finds her easily enough, but she’s already a corpse. His search for the missing papers lands him in the middle of an environmentalist terrorist plot aimed at the cattle industry, and in danger from unexpected sources.

   This wasn’t a bad first novel, though it wasn’t exceptionally good, either. Greer tells his story third-person primarily from Floyd’s standpoint, and does an adequate job of moving it along. I thought the Colorado ambiance was well done, too. The plot seemed to me to have a thread or two too many to it, and they didn’t quite come together believably at the end.

   Floyd had his moments, but    never did come fully to life for me. Greer put a fair amount of black rhetoris in the narrative, but  it had a distinctly  upper-middle-class ring to it; he doesn’t doesn’t know how to talk the talk.  BarbaraNeely probably wouldn’t give him the time of day.

   Blurb to the contrary, I don’t think he’s quite ready to “take his place beside Walter Mosley” — too many “buts.” Maybe later.

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #24, March 1996.

   

      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)
8. First of State (2010)