BOOK REVIEWS

The Night of the Dance

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

Hime's remarkable debut is a disturbing and richly textured tale of a young woman's murder that takes 10 years to unearth (literally). An incorruptible Texas Ranger teams with a local big-bellied sheriff and a prickly black deputy from the city in a crusade against evil in a dusty small town; the author, however, reworks such staples from central casting in surprising and thoroughly satisfying ways. He cuts between the viewpoints of these and other characters like a master film editor. Each cut ratchets up the suspense. Each character shows distinctive diction, foibles and personal morality (or lack thereof). Each viewpoint offers a different lens on the novel's complex, rapidly unfolding events. No less assured is Hime's use of the present tense, which grips the reader throughout with you-are-there immediacy. Add to the mix an up-and-coming female lawyer, a preacher's son who hears the Lord's voice urging him to be the next Timothy McVeigh and a county D.A. who seems to pull the strings on just about everyone. Then sprinkle generously with illicit sex, blackmail, political corruption, racism, religious hypocrisy and a few pinches of down-home humor (including delightful local idioms and a hilarious fart scene). Hime stokes the embers of Lone Star crime to white hot intensity, while ladling the grill with his distinctive home-brewed dressing. He's a first novelist to bet the ranch on.

KIRKUS BOOK REVIEWS

First-time Houston author Hime investigates a decade-old missing-persons case. Ten years after Rev. Jim Fletcher's hell-raising daughter Alicia shook the dust of Brenham, Texas (pop. 11,952), from her feet the night of the Rodeo Dance, Sheriff's Deputy Clyde Thomas learns that she never really left town; she's been resting under six feet of that dust all along. Certain that the African-American Clyde is the best detective on Washington County Sheriff Dewey Sharpe's force, manipulative DA George Barnett, who has excellent reasons for wanting Sissy's newly discovered murder to go unsolved, tries to get Dewey to quit courting retired Texas Ranger Jeremiah Spur as a helper and instead admit defeat by turning the case over to an active Ranger, provoking Clyde into quitting by taking it away from him. Barnett's plan fails only because (1) Sissy's brother Martin and his sidekick Dud Hughes kill Clyde's protégé Jasper Jefferson during a liquor-store robbery, bringing Clyde back onto the force, and (2) the unexpected involvement of Jeremiah's daughter Elizabeth, dying of cancer, with Sissy leads her father to offer his help. Brought together by their horse-trading alliances, Dewey, Clyde, and Jeremiah will have to face a lunatic who's channeling divine injunctions to bomb the courthouse; a dimwit ready to take Clyde's forbidden white lover, ADA Sonya Nichols, hostage; the mysterious "Room 15 Enterprises" that flourished ten years ago; and seemingly endless ranks of citizens determined to take whatever measures are necessary to keep Sissy's death a mystery. Rangy, shrewd, and heartfelt: an oversized debut stuffed with so many subplots it could only have come out of Texas.