Description:
While the world has evolved over the more than two decades since John Denson took on his first case (in Decoys), this randy pony-tailed PI seems to have gotten stuck somewhere back in the timestream. Forty-seven years old when we meet him again in Richard Hoyt's The Weatherman’s Daughters, Denson is still smoking pot, still referencing Carlos Castaneda, and driving a 30-year-old Volkswagen microbus. Yet his quirky perspective and "soft-boiled" style often work in his favor, as demonstrated in this lively, philosophical yarn involving flying seafood, right-wing militants, and ancient Chinese medicine. Driving back to his cabin in northwest Oregon, Denson is caught in a freakish shower of live salmon, the fish being sucked from the adjacent Columbia River by a giant waterspout. Amid this deluge, he discovers a young woman with a bullet hole in her chest and one of his business cards in her wallet. Police identify her as Sharon Toogood, daughter of a legendary Portland TV weatherman and the part-owner of a chain of New Age health stores. Had she been on her way to hire Denson or his Cowlitz Indian partner, putative shaman Willie Sees the Night? Her sister, Mariah, says Sharon was investigating something that could hurt their father's reputation, but before our hippie-ish hero can learn more, Mariah turns up dead as well. Doubting the conclusion of suicide, Denson sets out to learn who murdered the Toogood siblings and whether their passings are linked to a gang of poachers who've been killing bears for their gall bladders. Solving these mysteries, though, will force the detective (with Willie's guidance) to make an out-of-body house call on his "demented" creator. Hoyt's plot twists occasionally beggar belief, his dialogue can be pedantic, and most of his characters are insufficiently developed (the notable exception here being a double-jointed exotic dancer with computer smarts). Several of the previous seven Denson novels, including Siskiyou and Fish Story, were more ingeniously conceived and tightly constructed than The Weatherman's Daughters. However, the obvious delight Hoyt takes in dispatching his "aging dork" of a gumshoe to odd corners of the Pacific Northwest to talk with even odder locals rarely fails to entertain. If Hunter S. Thompson were to create a fictional detective, he might look very much like John Denson. --J. Kingston Pierce
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