Whiskey Sour by JA Konrath
Originally published at Ms. Amused. You can comment here or there.
I just read it again for the third time and it’s still a very fun and entertaining read. I say fun for Jack’s sardonic personality and the way she does her job and navigates around obstacles.
In the debut novel of the world of Jack Daniels, she is on the trail of a vicious killer who dumped a badly mutiliated body in a garbage can at the 7-11. A shellacked gingerbread man is found in the garbage with the body and so the hunt is on for the Gingerbread Man Killer.
The hardback is rather thin so it was a fast read. I notice this time around that some of the characters are rather one dimensional such as the “feebs”, a pair of FBI agents who are so completely out of touch with reality that you wonder how they manage to get through the day. But I already know from having read some of the other books in the series that just like the Law & Order/CSI serials on TV, character development does happen, just not at all once.
I remember finding Sue Grafton’s Kinsey rather stick in the mud until we started seeing more of her past and background in the later books. I remember the G book being the one where Kinsey finally displayed real human emotions.
Jack feels real right from the start. About what you’d expect for a female detective hitting 40ish, who grew up with a single mother who was also a cop. No nonsense, practical, cynical, but still with hope.
My favorite of the supporting cast is Phinaeous Trott (I know I butchered the spelling) who gets trotted out in the book in what appears to be the obvious set up for a romantic match. Or at least that’s always how it seems to go when you have a single (or about to be) female lead and a strong male character enters the picture with no clear purpose.
We also meet Herb Benedict, Jack’s partner who can’t seem to stop eating. We don’t really learn much more about him in Whiskey Sour but we will later. Then there is also Harry McGlade, a thorn from Jack’s past, and Latham, an accountant with a taste for danger who finds plenty in dating Jack.
The Gingerbread Man is particularly gruesome but it’s an interesting cat & mouse game. I had a hard time putting the book down even though I’d read it twice before and remembered enough of the ending to know how it was going to end. Just following Jack through her days was too much fun to skim through.
Now I’m impatient to go home and get Bloody Mary.