DEFECTIVE FOR HIRE is the first of two novels and a novelette featuring Nigel Blandwater-Cummings, a London-born oil executive from Houston now living with his wife, Annie, in New Antigua, Texas. Annie has left her position with the Houston Police Department to be a private detective in her hometown. Nigel’s job? Fix up the old house where the couple has settled. When boozy old Mrs. Sandoval’s dog goes missing, Nigel, seeking to stave off his handyman duties, agrees to find the pooch. When he also locates a drowning victim on the Sandoval estate, things get serious–for Nigel, at least, who can’t shake the feeling that the death was no accident. He launches his own investigation, trying his best to keep it from his wife, who really does want Nigel to get around to attaching the new kitchen drawer pulls. Throw in a deadpan butler, small-town gossips, a blundering police force, and an escaped anaconda, and you have the makings of a comedic crossover extravaganza.
The trick with comedy is not to go overboard. You don’t need a bon mot in every line. Here’s a good one: “[Annie] noticed a lack of vibrancy, a paucity of animation—an absence of joie de vivre. She’d noticed, to put it succinctly, that [Nigel] was dead.” Her husband was not dead, of course, merely sleeping and clutching his wife’s to-do list (and perhaps wishing he was dead). The line is well-paced, with the bathos at the end providing the punchline. Moreover, in comedic fiction, the characters should be more than laugh generators; they need authentic personalities. Annie and Nigel are set up as the classic domineering wife and henpecked husband, but Lowrey doesn’t stop there. Like any small business owner, Annie is a mix of ambition and jitteriness. And just when she seems most exasperated with her husband, she’ll stop, reflect, and utter, “I love you.” Nigel, for his part, is more than a John Cleese stand-in: he makes Annie’s lunch, buoys her when she’s down, and performs other small acts of devotion. All in all, D. R. Lowrey’s debut is a delight.
It’s Carl Hiaasen meets P. G. Wodehouse in D. R. Lowrey’s priceless debut DEFECTIVE FOR HIRE, where the plot moves, the characters feel like people you know, and the comedic dialogue is a masterclass in writing.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader