In the first book, Bad Move, the author crafted a fine balance between humor and the standard mystery genre. In Lone Wolf, the humor is lower key, and the suspense is dominant.

As the story opens, Zack is having lunch with a neighbor from the old neighborhood in Bad Move. Trixie Snelling operates a personal service out of her house as a dominatrix. (Is that sufficiently euphemistic?) He gets a phone call from Sarah. There’s a possibility that Zack’s dad has been killed by a bear.

Arlen Walker owns and manages a small fishing camp somewhere on a lake in the north. (Exact locations are vague in these books. It’s probably somewhere in eastern North America, maybe Canada, maybe the U.S.) Besides several cabins, he rents out a house which is presently occupied by the Wickens family: father Timmy, daughter, and grandson, wife, and two stepsons. They are antisocial, anti-everything. Arlen is afraid of them as is everyone else in the vicinity. He wants to evict them, but no lawyer will work on the case.

Arlen soon turns up safe and sound. He’s spent the night with his girlfriend. Zack believes that the victim, who was the daughter’s boyfriend, was killed not by a bear but by the Wickenses’ vicious dogs. The Wickenses are eager to reinforce the idea that it was a bear. Zack and Arlen are perturbed to learn than Timmy Wickens admires Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City bombing fame.

When Arlen hurts his ankle, Zack stays at the camp to help his dad run the place.

Also present and creating complications and subplots are several renters at Arlen’s camp including a man who sells adult diapers and has grand plans to develop lakeside land, a long-time renter and fishing enthusiast, the local sheriff Orville Thorne who looks very familiar to Zack and who is actively avoiding investigating the Wickenses, the owner of the local grocery who is trying to stop gay activists from marching in the fall fair parade, and Arlen’s girlfriend who owns a local café and is Orville’s aunt. In other words, real characters in both the literary and general sense.

The alleged bear attack that got Zack up there is but the first in a series of suspicious events.

The best reason to read Lone Wolf is the narrator Zack. His observations concerning the characters and the action can be laugh-out-loud funny. (He describes Wickens’ two stepsons as Darryl and Darryl which is perfect but perhaps too obscure for all readers.) Yes, he solves the crime and saves the day, but there’s a sense that it’s more out of dumb luck than skill and insight.

Readers who have met Zack in earlier books will certainly want to check out this one. It’s also a good choice for readers who have enjoyed the other comedy-mystery cross-genre novels such as the Solomon and Lord series by Paul Levine. The last couple of pages of Lone Wolf set the stage for a fourth book due out next year.

--Lesley Dunlap