Pun Salad

As readers may know, my to-be-read pile is deep, and my attacks on it are whimsical. So when Amazon tells me that I bought this paperback in August 2007… well, that's not surprising.

It has a lot going for it. There are glowing cover blurbs from Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, and Laura Lippman! I think the reason I got it, however, was (somehow) I became aware that it was set in Omaha, where I spent many of my Formative Years (1961-1969, age 10-18). And I can (finally) report: it's pretty good, crime fiction in the Elmore Leonard vein.

The protagonist, Matt Worth, is an Omaha beat cop whose career, and life generally, is on a downward slide. His wife left him for a homicide detective, and the resulting altercation got him assigned to the graveyard shift at SaveMore, an open-all-night supermarket. There, his attention is drawn to a young cashier, Gwen. She's nice, but occasionally comes to work with injuries that Worth's cop instincts (correctly) deduce are due to an abusive boyfriend.

Then things take a turn for the disastrous. Gwen's hospitalized, the boyfriend turns up dead, and Matt finds himself in the boyfriend's car with the corpse in the trunk (along with, unbeknownst to Matt, a boatload of cash). Also complicating matters: organized crime, dirty cops, a freak October snowstorm, a nosy neighbor, and discount furniture. So that all keeps the pages turning.

At the time of the book's writing, the author, Sean Doolittle, lived in Omaha, and it shows. The protagonist went to Central High, and there are references to real places like Creighton U, Clarkson Hospital (that's where I got my tonsils out in 1956!), Westroads, etc.. The "SaveMore" grocery store is placed at Saddle Creek and Leavenworth, which Google Maps tells me is really a Baker's these days.