Bottom Liner Blues (Rocksburg Novels)

Rating:
Summary: Like a fine wine, Mario Balzic only gets better with age
Review: I not only noticed when these books became Mario Balzic Novels instead of Mario Balzic Mysteries, I also applauded the change. After all, the chief attraction of K. C. Constantine's novels has always been the way our hero's mind worked more than the crimes in and around Rocksburg that he was trying to solve. There are those who applaud these novels for their regionalistic depiction of Western Pennsylvania, but I read them for Chief Balzic's fascinating conversations with everyone from the witnesses to some crime to the familiar patrons of Muscotti's.

However, the most important development in these last couple of novels has been the return of Balzic's family to prominence. Of course, now that family is reduce to Ruth, but that is more than enough. It seems she has unilaterally dissolved the marriage "in search of a better, more mutually satisfying relationship which I want to call a partnership." In the wake of Marie Balzic's death it turns out that not only did Mario lose his mother and Ruth her best friend, but also the couple lost the person that kept them connected to each other.

But our hero has other problems. The Rocksburg police force is woefully undermanned, the weather is unbearably hot, a strange woman tells a bizarre story about her violent husband going after a truck driver, and there is a crazy writer named Myushkin who pontificates without end at Balzic's favorite watering hole. To top this all off, the 64-year-old Balzic keeps flashing back to being a young Marine on the beaches of Iwo Jima.

"Bottom Liner Blues" is the 10th novel in this series by K. C. Constantine. The charm has always been the characters and the dialogue more than the mysteries or police procedure. Constantine has an excellent ear for the working-class dialect of Middle America and I can just picture the author working them out aloud rather than merely typing them on the page. Constantine also does not play favorites, more often than not giving the best lines and the most profound insights to characters other than Mario Balzic himself. In this one there is much more of a sense of all the pieces coming together than we have seen previously in these wonderful looks at the human comedy.