How can Jack refuse his old mentor, the guy who helped him when his legal career careened off track? So off he goes in search of Wesley's missing wife - who's incommunicado on a boat somewhere with a special gal pal. Jack confronts small-town big shots like B. T. Mack, the jerk deputy sheriff who arrested Wesley, and Billy Fletcher, the bow tie-wearing DA who wants to nail him. He hooks up with Miranda Glass, an ambitious tough-cookie newspaper reporter aching to write gory stories instead of features on used-car dealers who carve soap figures. He meets the amazing Reece Pepper, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who spins bad jokes and moonlights as a standup comic. He upchucks contaminated oysters and spends a couple days feeling woozy. He finds a dead body and loses it - but not to worry, he finds another one. He falls into bed with an old flame and thinks about whooping cranes.

Meanwhile, Wesley's gone and escaped from jail and is holed up in a motel, looking like Mr. Clean - literally, he wears a hoop earring and he's shaved his head as a disguise - and spinning his own webs with his henchman, Twinkie-gobbling ex-con sleazeball Arthur Murry Murray.

With lies on every tongue and deception all around him, Jack tries to peel away layers of deceit, getting more and more uncertain about just what he's managed to step into, and just how he's going to get out of it in one piece.

This is a well-written, nicely paced book, offering several surprises and startling but believable plot twists, and evoking a terrific sense of atmosphere. The trouble is, that atmosphere is one of nearly unmitigated sleaze. Jack Flippo and his cohorts inhabit a world of shabby diners, smoke-filled beer joints, seedy motels, and pervasive cynicism. It's a world where only money and what it can buy - sex, booze, and drugs - really matter. Lingering in Jack Flippo's world is like wallowing in a cesspit.

Consequently, it's extremely difficult, in the final analysis, to work up much real enthusiasm for the unmasking of the ultimate villain, because all the characters appear to be cut from the same nasty piece of cloth. They're scummy lowlifes or grasping wannabes, betrayed or betraying, who all seem to be guilty of something; it hardly matters much who is vindicated or incriminated, who lives or dies. House of Corrections offers good writing about a noxious milieu.

--Eleanor Mikucki