The Deputy

By:

Synopsis
Coyote Crossing is a dusty little sh*thole town in western Oklahoma. A sleepy little pit stop for truckers, not a lot going on. So a dead body in the middle of the street at midnight is quite an event. The chief of police wants all hands on deck, so he calls Toby Sawyer to come babysit the body. Toby doesn’t have a lot going for him. Twenty-five, a couple of years of junior college, married to a girl he got pregnant and living in a trailer on the edge of town. He’s working part time for the police department, hoping the budget comes through and they can put him on full time, so he can get health benefits. His wife is a waitress at a little crap diner near the railroad tracks. When he gets the call about the dead body, he pins his tin star to his Weezer t-shirt, slips into a pair of sweatpants and grabs his revolver. Victor Gischler is the author of five novels, includingGun Monkeys,Shotgun Opera, andGo-Go Girls of the Apocalypse. "[s]olid noir from Gischler. "-Publishers Weekly "Make no mistake: this sh*t is just as fast and funny as what we’ve come to expect from the man who gave us such classics as Pistol Poets and Shotgun Opera; it’s just that this time out it hurts more, the characters dig under a couple more layers of your skin. The Deputy is Victor Gischler’s finest book to date, and you better f*cking believe that’s f*cking saying something. "-BSC Reviews
Copyright:
2010

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9781440530784
Publisher:
Tyrus Books
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Victor Gischler
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Literature and Fiction, Mystery and Thrillers
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

3 out of 5

By on

I don't know what it is about this book, but even as I enjoyed it, something seemed off. Our antihero, Toby, tried to escape his Oklahoma backwater by hitting the road as a musician. He came back after his mother's death, knocked up a girl as a result of some post-funeral pity-sex, and how he's stuck. He faked his way through police academy, and has somehow lucked into a part-time gig as a sheriff's deputy, which is how he spends his time, aside from diddling an underage goth chick in town, to keep himself busy and to help him tolerate a wife he doesn't love and a toddler he loves dearly. And that's where the story begins: TOby on duty one hot summer night, ordered by the sheriff to stand guard over a body found in the street. But Toby slips off to see his honey, and while he's doing that, the body disapears. This sets off a bloody chain of events involving human trafficking and corruption within the sheriff's department. But ... something feels wrong. Somehow, even though Gischler tries hard to make Toby as dumb as possible, you get the feeling he's a little too smart for his surroundings, and for the type of character he's supposed to be. Gischler himself hsa a doctorate in English, and his bio at the end of the book reads like the label on a craft beer, all snarky "ironic" humor. All that, combined with my gut feeling, leads me to feel that the Toby character rings just a little bit forced. That, and an ending that is way too neat and tidy, after all that bloodshed. It just seems like GIschler has lived in small towns and has observed a lot, but he isn't FROM a small town, and so the atmosphere is just a little hollow. Still, it's short and entertaining, so you won't have to devote much time to it. I did enjoy it, but it won't be making any top-ten lists.