Leather Maiden by Joe R. Lansdale
**** Vintage crime 287 pages
Lansdale is the East Teaxas author known to most as the evil genius behind the horror short story Bubba-Ho-Tep which became a movie starring Bruce Campbell directed by Phantasm director Don Coscarelli. To his readers he is known mostly for writing southern gothic weird crime mysteries.
It makes no difference what genre he writes in I spent the majority of the books laughing. The novels have the sarcastic dialogue of Fletch novels, but the narration also has a level of sarcasm that bring great hunor to his books.
This novel Leather Maiden is a murder mystery and the humor comes mostly in the third person narration of Iraq war vet and small town Reporter named Cason. He has returned to his small Texas town to a job at the shitty little paper and inherited a column that appears weekly.It appears at first this sleepy little town will be boring, but in the end he is able to discover a murder conspiracy that no one else seems to have noticed.
The fantastic dialogue between characters is a highlight, Lansdale shares the skill for dialogue that is only matched by Tarintino, Elmore Leonard, and Gregory Macdonald. If you have dark or grumpy sense of humor you can’t really go wrong with this, or any other Lansdale novel.
Hard to go wrong with Lansdale. This one sounds like it ought to be a good read, too. Dig the title, at any rate. :)
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