Jason Miller's second Slim in Little Egypt crime novel (after Down Don't Bother Me) cuts through a rich seam in the underworld of southern Illinois coal country. A former coal miner turned occasional private investigator, Slim is a single parent raising his precocious 13-year-old daughter, Anci. When two sketchy locals show up at their door offering cash to find their missing pit bull, Anci quickly speaks up as Slim's "business manager" and agrees to the job. Hardly breaking a sweat, Slim and his right-hand muscle, Jeep, run down and rough up lowlife Dennis Reach, who reluctantly points them to where the dog is caged. Too easy. Soon after, the dognapper's head is blown open and Slim is the prime suspect. To clear himself, he follows a trail that leads into a cabal of white supremacists, shady drug and gun dealers, arrogant mine owners, vindictive county sheriffs, a dogfighting ring and the pivotal femme fatale Carol Ray--Reach's ex-wife and owner of Shotguns & Shakes, "a combination burger joint/shooting range."
Red Dog is violent country noir at its funniest--as if Tim Dorsey wandered out of Florida into Donald Ray Pollock's white trash Knockemstiff, Ohio. Miller nails the argot and warped minds of nimrods who "looked the same, but they were missing different teeth." Even when threatened by the psychopathic poobah of the White Dragons, Slim wryly observes: "He was awfully serious now.... Henrik Ibsen would have told him to lighten up." Slim, Jeep and the perspicacious Anci make for a lively team of good guys in the crime-ridden hollers of Illinois's rural Little Egypt. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.