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an entertaining read, suspenseful, crisp and periodically witty right to a satisfying ending.
The kickoff to Mike Harrison's third book is nifty: a just-fired Calgary advertising executive, middle-aged and a bit overweight, is getting cash from a bank ATM when, at the next machine, a young man suddenly starts slamming his wife.
Paul Miller grabs the husband, hauls him across the lobby and is beaten and kicked to the ground for his trouble.
What gets caught on bank security cameras, though, is only the part in which Miller is dragging the husband, Victor Shriver. And so, battered and hospitalized though he is, Miller's the one who gets charged with assault.
And Victor's wife Ruby won't confirm Miller's version -- just as she has never pressed charges during a long medical history featuring many of her own bruises and broken bones.
Victor, now scenting a different kind of blood, insists on pushing ahead with the charge against Miller, who in turn proposes a deal: if Miller can win a three-round fair-fight boxing match against Victor, the charge will disappear.
Clearly this is stupid, a vain surge of misplaced testosterone in an out-of-shape guy a little too fed up with loss.
Miller's wife Valerie, not remotely inclined to be a victim, including through widowhood, hires local private investigator -- and Ruby Tuesday narrator -- Eddie Dancer to somehow prevent the fight.
She would like this accomplished without her stubborn husband finding out, but Dancer soon finds that won't be possible. He does scout out Victor's home turf -- a nasty, isolated spread with a couple of trailers, a barn, a miserable dog, and Victor, Ruby, and Victor's brute of a father.
Dancer takes a shot at getting Ruby on his side, but she's less meek with him than with her husband or father-in-law, and he assumes she is just another sad hostage to battered-spouse syndrome.
He also takes a shot at Victor himself, luring him into a bar fight to see what, if any, boxing techniques he possesses. And Victor has enough, Dancer concludes, to wipe the floor with Paul Miller.
Since Dancer can't find a way to stop the fight, but hoping for the best while fearing the worst, he sets out to at least get Miller some proper boxing training.
He also tries to keep an eye on the viciously unhappy Shriver menage, discovering in the process that their former horse barn is now being used for quite other purposes.
As word spreads about the strange terms and ill-suited opponents of the boxing match, media gather and the grudgefest grows to international interest, TV coverage and seriously escalated ticket prices.
The bout itself may be the novel's climax, but it isn't the end. More grimness lies ahead, along with a surprising outbreak of justice.
Mike Harrison, who writes in the clipped, self-conscious, semi-sentence style of the old crime noirists, has nevertheless produced an entertaining read, suspenseful, crisp and periodically witty right to a satisfying ending.
Except for the dog. Last seen the pitiful Shriver guard dog is chained to a stake in the hot sunshine, and Harrison finishes his novel without sending any of his characters, even the tender-hearted ones, to the rescue.
Joan Barfoot is a novelist living in London.
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