The Investigator by John Sandford

 

Hawkes’s father had been a white-trash loafer, hard drinker and sometime over-the-road trucker out of Houston. Her mother worked occasionally as a house cleaner and a window-washer for rich people as she tried to take care of her seven children. She took them to church some Sundays and read to them from the Bible some nights, which Hawkes found stultifying and often incomprehensible. The Army, Hawkes thought, was the one way out of that life, if you couldn't afford community college. She was wrong about that; some things that you were born with, you can never escape. She was white trash.

This neo-Western from the impressively entertaining Sandford allows him to feature a new character in the form of Letty Davenport.

Often when an author attempts to concoct a fictional bad-ass, it falls flat as one doubts the bona fides of the author themselves being able to recognize anything in true toughness.

One must live a life to describe it with any accuracy. Too often our fictional “heroes” are echoes of other fictional “heroes” the author has read of.

We can all feel the authenticity when we are offered anything from someone who has really lived or who has really seen.

John Sandford was an award-winning crime repeater. He’s been to crime scenes; he’s sat in SUVs overnight sipping cold coffee with US Marshals. That experience shows.

What is all the more impressive here—he offers us a bad-ass in feminine form and makes her real and all the more formidable than the now cartoonish Jack Reacher.

Letty lives and learns from each step of the investigation—a subtle but too often ignored aspect of fictional exploits.

The plot involves our heroine down Texas-way and a bad of self-styled militia who have something big planned.

No worries, this is not a political novel. It is a novel of “Folks who feel left behind, and we’re not gonna take it anymore.”

It gets the indignation right.

It gets the misguided consequences right.

Mr. Sandford impresses again.