scmrak's Full Review: Joe R. Lansdale - Leather Maiden
Life has not recently been kind to Cason Statler. Once a Pulitzer-nominated Houston reporter, Statler wasted a promising career on an overactive libido and too many Jim Beams with beer chasers. An Army hitch in Iraq didn't straighten him out; it just left him with an aversion to hot, dry places and an unsavory buddy known only as "Booger." Time to start turning his life around with a new job...
Lo, how the talented have fallen: that new position is writing a column for the Camp Rapture Reporter, the tiny newspaper in his east Texas home town. Yep, he moves back in with Mom and Dad - at least temporarily. Among his predecessor's notes on key lime pie recipes and beauty pageants, Cason finds a short column about a history major at the local college, missing and presumed dead for the past several months. Fodder for a follow-up column, he wonders? but is it the tragedy of Caroline Allison that piques his interest, or the accompanying photo of a woman of astonishing beauty? Whichever... the column gets written.
The "Caroline is still missing" column is well-received - too well-received in certain quarters: an anonymous DVD dropped in his mailbox reveals quite juicy blackmail material involving Caroline and... well, let's just say that the contents hit close to home. All of which pulls Cason right down the proverbial rabbit hole after a blackmail plot that takes an insane segue into a dark world of murder, assassination, and unspeakable brutality. Cason's only hope for survival is a well-timed visit from the cavalry: cue the bugles!
Joe Lansdales' Nacogdoches, Texas, house must certainly list to one side - toward where he's stacked all his literary awards on the mantle (along with a few martial arts trophies as well). He has a clutch of Bram Stokers (seven) and an Edgar (in 2001 for The Bottoms); awards from mystery and horror conventions on both sides of the pond. He's written for comics, television, and the movies; along with his east Texas mystery series featuring Leonard Pine and Hap Collins. In short, he's talented and versatile.
Leather Maidenmarks Lansdale's return to Camp Rapture, complete with its present-day dog food plant and a small university probably based on Stephen F. Austin State in Nacogdoches. His 2004 novel Sunset and Sawdustwas also set in those piney woods along the Sabine River; and his protagonist Sunset Jones, the first woman sheriff in east Texas, was Cason Statler's grandmother. East Texas, as anyone who's ever spent much time there will affirm, is a small world...
Leather Maiden is vintage Lansdale, combining a mystery with a touch of the macabre, all with an overlay of persistent humor that's just a notch shy of raw. Lansdale sets the action against the backdrop of a small southern town populated by people who are in turn smart enough to play dumb and dumb enough to play smart - essentially the model on which every small town is built. That's not to mention that they're hilarious in their make-believe, self-deprecating buffoonery; and even more hilarious when it's notmake-believe. Lansdale also gets it right when it comes to the uneasy racial truce that characterizes so many small southern towns a generation and a half after the Civil Rights Act was passed
What might have been a whimsical pastoral tale of a little east Texas town, however, has at its core a touch of pure evil. The disappearance of Caroline Allison all those months ago is just the part of an iceberg that lies above the surface. Cason Statler's long, strange journey will uncover far more than a little racial tension or an opportunistic murder, however; it will uncover that streak of inhumanity that knows no boundaries of race, creed, color, or class. Not only will Cason's journey uncover the trail of evil in his home town, though; it will also force him to examine his own psyche for the same streak of inhumanity. There are few authors who have the ability to create a character as flawed as Cason Statler and keep him likeable, and Joe Lansdale is one of them - he can even make Cason's buddy Booger look good, and that's a tough one.
Leather Maiden is just what we've come to expect from Joe Lansdale: a deftly-plotted, twisty mystery that's sexy, violent, funny, and thought-provoking; and sometimes several of them at once.
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