Harry Barnes and his scrappy legal team have never shied away from either sleazy clients or unusual cases. But when an old flame asks him to investigate the murder of her uncle—a much-reviled MLB ump who flubbed an obvious call in game 7 of the World Series—it leads to a seemingly impossible question: how do you fix an event that’s televised live with a multi-person team making and reviewing the calls? The answer leads Harry all over town, and, before long, into the crosshairs of a professional assassin.

The latest in the Erica Banks series (named for the assassin in question), Bill Black’s TWO BULLETS IN A BAYOU has exactly what it needs: a grumpy old lawyer who rubs shoulders with criminals, low-lifes, and sleazeballs; immense love for its city, regardless of the crooked cops and politicians running it; and a plot that seems straightforward at first, but ultimately knits together threads running all the way around the world and meeting in New Orleans. The character work is thin (Harry is a stereotype of an aging loser; and the eponymous assassin Erica is flimsily described in highly gendered terms that teeter between laughable and gross), but that’s because the focus is on the bouncy, kinetic plot. The novel is at its best in the meat of its investigation: the particulars of how the World Series is broadcast, for instance, come across with clarity and immense interest. Harry’s narrative voice begins to grate across the length of the story (we get it: he knows every good restaurant in town), but it adds just enough color for the reader to feel the heat and smell the salt in the air.

TWO BULLETS IN A BAYOU manages to squeeze in everything its intended audience wants, but it could still use some cleanup to improve the reading experience. Some formatting issues remain—especially seemingly random changes to the margins and justification of the text, which can cause issues with indentations and paragraph breaks. In its enthusiasm to prove its NOLA bona fides, this book sometimes crams in so many dependent clauses that sentences feel garbled and awkward: “She made a gator on the hunt of a nutria in a bayou for breakfast look wandering.” The text has plenty of extraneous material, and it feels like it’s still finding the balance between evocative description that enhances verisimilitude and rote information that should be trimmed—as when certain documents were “on file with the city and downloadable from the website,” so a character “saved the file for just this moment and called it up now from her cloud account.” The plot moves quickly, and many chapters are only one or two pages, so the cumbersome prose is at loggerheads with the intended flow. One round of sensible trimming would do much to strengthen the text.

However, as it stands, TWO BULLETS IN A BAYOU will still scratch the itch for a light thriller—even for veteran fans of the genre.

Bill Black’s TWO BULLETS IN A BAYOU will deliver everything readers want in a quick, casual thriller.

~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader