One Good and Deadly Deed

October 1, 2020
Do you suspect that the real attraction of crime fiction isn't the pow-pow plots but the chance to enjoy offbeat characters? If so, you're likely to enjoy Luke McWhorter, who paid his way through Yale Divinity School by delivering sermons. He was planning a career as a "gospel preacher," but his sheriff father was murdered, and he suddenly found himself forced to take Dad's job. Luke still sermonizes at the parish church in his Texas hometown, but he's ready when a gruesome double murder is discovered: two pilots are pushed into whirring propeller blades. The investigation quickly loses focus and so, for good or ill, does the novel. Along the way, Luke confronts Middle Eastern terrorists, a mummy, a company offering designer babies, a Falwell-like religious carnival, and wind turbines that catch fire and throw off blades. Somewhere in the midst of all this, readers must relax expectations and enjoy the vaudeville of Luke's adventures. Be ready when the narrative halts for stand-up. Why was the biblical Noah so bad at fishing? He only had two worms.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

August 17, 2020
Lynch’s amiably rambling sequel to 2019’s A Fragment Too Far opens in a blood-drenched West Texas hanger, where two pilots were apparently shoved into the spinning propellers of their airplane. Sheriff Luke McWhorter is faced with a bewildering variety of explanations for the crime. The FBI, whose agents were tracking the pilots’ flights to Mount Ararat in Turkey, suspects that WMD smuggling was involved. On the other hand, local fundamentalist showman Craft Roberts, who’s about to open a glitzy Christian museum, may have hired the pilots to get artifacts from the biblical Ark for a museum exhibit and then decided to silence them. Or rogue Mossad agents might have been responsible. Meanwhile, the arrogant president of the Thesaurus of the Gene Corporation is dropping hints about extracting DNA from very old bones. Lynch plays with many threads and leaves most dangling, and the plot simply stops in a shoot-out at the hospital where a woman is giving birth to babies who may have been conceived with some highly unusual DNA. Readers should be prepared for a fun if frustrating ride. Agent: Steven Schwartz, Jane Freymann Literary.