Leather Maiden [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Joe R. Lansdale (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 5, 2008

A masterly new thriller from the Edgar Award–winning writer who has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace” (The New York Times Book Review).

After a scandalous affair costs him his job in Houston, Cason Statler—Gulf War veteran and Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist—returns home to the small east Texas town of Camp Rapture. Cason is a wreck. He drinks too much, he’s stalking his ex-girlfriend, and he’s wallowing in envy of his successful older brother. To get back on his feet, he takes a job at the local paper, and when he stumbles across his predecessor’s notes on a cold case murder file, he thinks he’s found the thing that’ll keep him out of trouble. No such luck. The further he digs into the case, the more certain he is that the unsolved crime is connected to a series of eerie, inexplicable events that have recently occurred in town. And he knows his suspicions are right on when he finds himself dragged into a deadly game of blackmail and murder that clearly has evil as its only goal.

Leather Maiden is a brash amalgam of suspense, raw humor, and mystery that unfolds in the vividly rendered shadowy lowlands of eastern Texas. It’s country noir as only Joe Lansdale can do it.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cason Statler, a Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist with a checkered past, returns to his small hometown of Camp Rapture, Tex., to work as a columnist for the local newspaper in this fine stand-alone from Lansdale (Lost Echoes). On the hunt for spicy material, Statler latches onto the story of a missing college student who disappeared under strange circumstances a year earlier. Almost immediately, Statler connects the case to a recent string of kinky, unsettling crimes throughout east Texas. What's more, his brother, a college history professor, appears to be caught in the swirl of events as a victim or possibly even a suspect. As usual, Lansdale offers salty humor, brisk plotting and appealingly off-key characters who move through a world that's at one moment folksy and the next macabre. This isn't the author's best effort—as a main character, Statler is too much a work-in-progress—but you can never go too far wrong with Lansdale, who's won an Edgar and six Stokers, among many other awards. 4-city author tour.(Aug.) ""
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Hoping to regain control of his life, Cason Statler returns home to Camp Rapture in East Texas, but he needs more than Mom’s cooking to get back on track. Cason is a wreck, drinking too much, obsessing about the woman who ditched him while he was in Iraq, and having bad dreams about what he did in Iraq. He’s also gnawing on the loss of a promising career as a journalist. Even a Pulitzer nomination couldn’t save his job after he had an affair with his editor’s wife—and his daughter. But he lands a job with the Camp Rapture Report as a columnist and quickly becomes interested in the six-month-old disappearance of a college student, which reminds him that some very hinky things go on in small towns. Lansdale has been writing his brand of quirky country noir for several decades, with frequent excursions into fantasy, SF, horror, and westerns; fans of each genre revere him. Leather Maiden shows that Lansdale still has the crime chops he demonstrated in his Hap Collins/Leonard Pine novels. His East Texas remains a brooding, scary, fascinating place filled with offbeat characters whose dialogue is often wonderfully funny and, just as often, inventively vulgar. The violence is brief but intense, proving yet again that Lansdale country is no place for the squeamish. --Thomas Gaughan

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375414525
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414527
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #153,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in eighteen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Hotep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror." He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Down-home noir August 5, 2008

By Craig Clarke VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Cason Statler is an Iraqi War vet returned home to Camp Rapture, Texas. Before his time in the service -- he signed up for Afghanistan after 9/11 but was shipped to Iraq, go figure! -- Cason was a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, so the local paper is happy to hire the "local boy made good" as a columnist.

Cason is wondering if there'll be anything to write about in such a slow town when he comes across the notes left by his predecessor (best known for her weekly survey of local garden insects) regarding the unsolved disappearance of teenager Caroline Allison.

Meanwhile, Cason struggles with the return to his hometown, among other things: living at home with his parents again in the wake of his more successful brother; a drinking problem that may or may not be out of hand; and being dumped by the girlfriend whose presence helped see him through the war. When Cason's brother's reputation is threatened by blackmailers, the two of them have to work together as a sort of private detective/vigilante team, and Cason learns that his brother has weaknesses too. Including one that connects him to the Allison girl.

Nearing the end of his third decade as a horror and crime fiction author, Joe R. Lansdale (winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Bottoms, and more Bram Stoker Awards than you can count on one hand) is still topping himself with each new novel, singling himself out with his particular style of down-home noir.

Leather Maiden combines Lansdale's talents for mystery plotting, quirky but realistic characterizations, colloquial dialogue that doesn't resort to dialect, and an intense portrayal of the dark and light of daily life in the rural South that can only come from a native. The result of this is a novel that offers emotional depth and authenticity along with a fun read. I wrote that Lost Echoes, Lansdale's previous novel, was "very likely the best thing he has ever written." Leather Maiden may be even better.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Leather Maiden October 24, 2008

By Gloria Feit VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

You know what a pleasure is in store for you from the first page of "Leather Maiden," the newest book from Joe Lansdale, upon being introduced to Cason Statler. He is returning to Camp Rapture, where his parents and his brother and sister-in-law still live, an old timber town in East Texas where he grew up and where is now moving back, after stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he earned some medals, and a newspaper job in Houston, where he earned a Pulitzer nomination, all of which have had a profound effect on his psyche.

The author's description of Cason's entry into town: "It was a bright day, the sunlight like a burst egg yolk running all over the sidewalk and through the yards, almost snuffing out the grass with its heated glory, and causing everything to be warm and appear fresh, even the houses on the poor side of town from which ancient coats of basic white peeled like stripping sunburn." After his first day back, he sits outside his parents' house and "leaned back and looked up at the stars. They were shiny and bright, and there was something right about the heavens that made me want to live forever. I had had that feeling before. It never lasted."

Cason has come back to interview for a job as a journalist on the local Camp Rapture Report, a far cry from the paper from which he was fired in Houston, after screwing up his life there with his excessive drinking and other, quite personal dalliances, he is happy to be hired there as a columnist. Trying to find something to interest him, he finds notes made by his predecessor on a cold case, that of the disappearance of a spectacularly beautiful girl six months prior, a 23-year-old history major at the University. He feels that story is ripe for a series of articles about "the illusion of safety in a small town." He despondently feels it might be the only interesting thing he'd ever get to write about there. Though he is warned by the police chief that "there isn't any such thing as a quiet town, unless maybe there are two people in it and one of them is dead." After the first article runs he finds he has stirred up reactions that perhaps would have better been left undisturbed, and there are some personal implications for Cason.

The portrait painted by the author is very evocative: "The sun was falling into the trees and it looked like a peeled red plum coming apart. A flock of black birds was moving from one tree to the other as my car startled them. They moved so well in tight formation they appeared to be a wind-blown cloud of crude oil. Finally they had had enough and broke over the trees and flew into the face of the dying sun, black freckles on a bright red face."

The portrait of small-town America is well-drawn, mostly dormant but still persistent racial tensions realistically depicted. The writing and the characters are original; particularly Cason's "friend" with the quaint nickname "Booger," who served with him in Iraq and saved his life more than once and now owns a gun range and a bar, and of whom he says the following: "I call Booger a friend, but I'm not really sure I mean it. He may be more of an attachment, like a growth of some sort. It was like I told Dad. I want to get rid of him, cut him out, but there are complications and attachments. . . . I suppose it's our Iraq connection. That kind of thing, making war together, gives us a link; sometimes, for me, that link is like a ball and chain. Booger, in many ways, has yet to quit fighting the war. Originally, he moved his inborn hatred of just about everybody from Oklahoma to Iraq, and now that he was home again, shooting squirrels and deer didn't do it anymore. He kept hoping they'd call him back to Iraq. He liked the smell of blood, the charred odor of burning corpses. He liked being shot at. He told me so. He was that soldier that gave the rest of us a bad name." Reminiscent of Elvis Cole's "Joe Pike," Spenser's "Hawk" and Myron Bolitar's "Win," he is not a character the reader will easily forget.

The story is suspenseful and in between the murder and blackmail it is laced with humor, some of the laugh-out-loud variety. But don't let that fool you. The author steadily builds the suspense as the tale progresses, till you find yourself holding your breath as the conclusion nears. And just when you think you can take a deep breath he has another stunning twist in store. Mr. Lansdale has written another quirky and fast-paced novel, one which will keep the reader guessing and hugely entertained right through to the last page.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read! August 23, 2008

By Richard J. Dory, Jr.

Format:Hardcover

I loved this book. Great characters. Tense. Funny. Shocking. Surprising.
Joe Lansdale has done it again. Well worth the money. Highly recommended.
Also recommend: THE BOTTOMS, by Lansdale. SUNSET AND SAWDUST, by Lansdale
DIRTY WHITE BOYS, by Stephen Hunter.