Kenny Lee was relegated to writing for a small town newspaper after a huge public scandal. He’d been looking for a new story, something big, something that could propel him out of West Windsor, New Jersey ever since. He didn’t think that the shooting of the young man who worked at the gas station would be that thing.
Andrea Stern didn’t think she’d be stumbling into a crime scene, but when one of her four children desperately needed a bathroom, she stopped at the closest gas station. It wasn’t until after she’d parked and grabbed her daughter that she noticed the police standing around and the man with the bullet that had gone through his head. Too stunned to move, she continued to hold her daughter while the girl peed on the unsecured murder scene.
Before Andrea had left college to get married and start having babies (she was currently 7 months pregnant with their fifth), she had been well on her way to becoming on the FBI’s best profilers. She’d already helped them catch a serial killer. And a quick glance around that gas station parking lot told her enough about what had happened that night.
At the police press conference later, they announced that the killing had probably been from a robbery. When Kenny talked to his cop friend, he’d been told that the man had been into drugs. Both Kenny and Andrea knew that the police were lying. What they didn’t know was why. But when Andie starts to put it together, she knows she’ll need Kenny’s help to get all the evidence together.
The gas station attendant is part of the Indian community that has been growing in West Windsor. Is it possible that the murder was racially motivated? Or is there something else going on, something the police don’t want their community to know? As Kenny and Andrea ask questions and dig through old paperwork, they realize that this latest killing is just a distraction from the real crime, the one that town officials have been hiding for decades.
Suburban Dicks is the debut novel from the cocreator of Deadpool. Author Fabian Nicieza has put together two unlikely but never boring amateur detectives to dig for the answers in this fun mystery that is bristling with personality, sarcasm, children, and intelligence. Filled with surprises and twists, challenging family relationships and self-actualization, and too many doughnuts (I so want doughnuts right now!), Suburban Dicks takes the modern mystery novel and turns it on its head, taking us to a whole new level.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this one. When you hear that the author is the cocreator of something as crazy funny as Deadpool, you have to know that the story could go in just about any direction. So I was pleasantly surprise to find a fairly typical crime that just happens to be exposed by two unusual citizens. Kenny is interesting, but Andrea steals just about every scene she’s in, and I have all my fingers crossed for more novels with these two. I think Andie is exactly the crime fighter we need these days, and I am here for any novel that features her and her fascinating mind.
Egalleys for Suburban Dicks were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.
