Rating: 
Summary: Champion Joe has done it again
Review: While this book is very good and very well written, it almost feels like the family from the Bottoms picked up and moved to a drive-in. Don't get me wrong there are big differences between the families, but this is another coming of age story by Champion Joe that involves gruesome murders. I guess you could call this a sequel in tone to the Bottoms. Once again our hero is a young lad spending his time investigating a couple of grisly murders. What sets this book apart from the Bottoms is that this family is a little more affluent, and live in a nicer town. Also aside from the basic premise of a young man solving murders the stories and characters are completely different. I enjoyed the fact that the father in A Fine Dark Line is not a perfect man. He has a temper that can go off at any second. He has no qualms about "slapping a teenager smart," or beating on a man who abuses both Stanley's and his own family. I liked that we actually witnessed the hero, Stanley Jr., getting smarter as the book progressed. I felt the writing style got a little better as the book went on, and since it was written in the first person from Stanley Jr.'s point-of-view, I thought the writing style reflected the protagonist getting smarter. My one complaint is that this book lacked much of that famous Lansdale dialog. You know the kind. The dialog scenes that would have you belly laughing. Those kinds of dialog. To be kind, there is a great dialog near the end of the book between Stanley Jr. and one of his family's tormentors. I won't say any more. "The worm has spoken."
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