Doc Whitney has just done a 20-year prison stretch for the brutal murders of his wife and children. Now he's on parole and back in Bakersfield, his hometown and scene of the murders. Luke DiVilbiss, a powerful local attorney, hires private investigator Wil Hardesty to determine why Whitney is harassing DiVilbiss' family. Hardesty doesn't like what he learns. Whitney may have been framed for the 20-year-old murders, and DiVilbiss, in concert with the local cops, may have been part of the conspiracy. When Whitney is killed, Hardesty embarks on a quixotic quest to clear Whitney's name, and it nearly costs him his own life. Shamus-winner Barre evokes the ever-present past as a melancholy backdrop against which Hardesty works his lone-wolf magic. This is a rising series that--despite its generally somber tone--is beginning to include touches of very welcome humor.
Wes Lukowsky
From Kirkus Reviews
Nineteen years ago, country music star Don Lee (``Doc'') Whitney was arrested for killing his fourth wife and their two daughters and telling the police he was too drunk to remember a thing; five years ago, long after he'd been sentenced on three counts of manslaughter, he found out that his father Gib, the oilman who'd vanished when he was still a teenager, had been spending all that time in a sumphole with a bullet in his head. Now Doc's been released back into California's Central Valley, and wealthy Luther DeVillbis, Gib's one-time partner, wants to hire Wil Hardesty (The Ghosts of Morning, 12998, etc.) to talk some sense into Doc before he comes gunning for Lute. But the two p.i.'s Lute had already hired to do the job get killed instead, and suddenly Wil's swapped jobs and clients: he's now helping Doc's ex-wife Jenelle Lockhart prove that the wild man's innocent of the latest shotgunnings. As time will tell, the complications have only begun, as has the death toll (one of Barre's many borrowings from The Big Sleep is the elevated body count; another is the ubiquitous power of professional criminals everybody abhors who manage to make their way into the back rooms of the rich anyway). The result is something for everyone: sex and drugs, love spurned and faithful, strong men and stronger women, and enough dastardly plotters to people a circle of hell. Barre swings for the fences once more with this sprawling, convoluted blast from the past, though the total effect is like an overdose of tiramisu, gunpowder, or guilt. --
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