THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 7
A COMMON JOKEin crime fiction
circles is that asking “What is
noir?” will result in hours of
unending argument. (I tend to go
by the writer Jack Bludis’s defini-
tion: “hard-boiled = tough, noir =
screwed.”) Eli Cranor’s top-shelf
debut, DON’T KNOW TOUGH (Soho
Crime, 322 pp., $24.95),is unmis-
takably noir in the Southern
tradition, a cauldron of terrible
choices and even more terrible
outcomes.
Trent Powers is a newcomer in
Denton, Ark., where he’s been
hired to coach a local high school
football team to playoff victory.
To do that, Powers will need to
harness the talents of the run-
ning back Billy Lowe, who has
often short-circuited the team
with his erratic behavior on the
field.
Lowe, “a sawed-off white boy
with tree-trunk thighs, built low
and hard to the ground, trapezius
muscles bulging up from his
shoulders to his earlobes,” has
long suffered at the hands of his
mother’s boyfriend: “The other
day he got a cigarette stuck in
his neck, and he took it like a
man.” Powers believes his men-
torship and the power of prayer
can lead his star player to a more
righteous path, but it is this very
belief that will cost him — and
most everyone in Denton — all
the more dearly.
There is a raw ferocity to
Cranor’s prose, perfectly in keep-
ing with the novel’s examination
of curdling masculinity. “Don’t
Know Tough” is, so far, one of the
best debuts of 2022.
PAST FOOTBALL GLORIESalso
figure prominently in HIDEOUT
(Doubleday, 350 pp., $27),Louisa
Luna’s third novel featuring the
private investigators Alice Vega
and Max Caplan. Vega’s latest job
is to find Zeb Williams, whose
college exploits went from leg-
endary to infamous when, in the
waning seconds of a key game, he
took the ball, ran out of the sta-
dium and vanished.
The husband of Zeb’s former
girlfriend is Vega’s client, some-
thing she finds odd, but she’ll
take the money. The trail leads
her to a fear-gripped town in
Oregon that’s ruled by a couple of
families with white supremacist
ties. Vega’s instinct for pushing
away help — especially that of
her sometime partner Cap —
could land her in real trouble.
Luna takes the usual private
eye tropes and imbues them with
added resonance. Vega is an
excellent investigator who does-
n’t bounce back right away from
physical harm, and her relation-
ship with Cap earns its complex-
ity. I know I’ll be reading more of
this series, and you should, too.“THERE WAS A SAYINGamong
these people: A dry year will
scare you to death, and a wet
year will kill you.” This sense of
perpetual dread permeates Dane
Bahr’s evocative debut, THE
HOUSEBOAT (Counterpoint, 242 pp.,
$26), which chronicles an espe-
cially volatile year in Oscar, Iowa
— a year when the Mississippi
River town turned on its own as
the weather moved from drought
to torrents: “Four days of hard
rain and the river became a
butcher. It would rip at the banks
as it swelled and cleave the edges
of cropland like a knife to
brisket.”
Just outside town, a girl, dis-
covered in the woods, claims her
boyfriend has been murdered,
though no one has found a body.
Still, the collective suspicion
lands on Rigby Sellers, a loner
who lives in a rotting houseboaton the river with only a creepy
salvaged mannequin for com-
pany: “He’d often talk to her.
Sometimes try to feed her....
He’d dress her up and comb his
fingers through her abrasive hair
and tell her how pretty she was.”
Sellers seems impervious to
increasingly lurid rumors about
his character and behavior. When
the local sheriff enlists the help of
a detective, events spin ever
darker.
Bahr deftly moves back and
forth in time; his short chapters,
which feature the perspectives of
different townspeople, add to the
feeling that the enormity of the
horror cannot be fully compre-
hended. “The Houseboat” re-
minded me of works by Robert
Bloch strained through a more
literary — but quite welcome —
sensibility.IN THE VILLAGEof Shady Hollow
— “nestled deep in the woods,
covering a wide valley between
two mountains” — folks drink
coffee at Joe’s Mug, buy the
latest releases from Nevermore
Books and get their news from
The Shady Hollow Gazette. Ev-
ery so often, the bucolic little
town is shaken up by murder.
And oh yeah, one more thing: All
the residents are animals.
COLD CLAY (Vintage Crime/Black
Lizard, 221 pp., paper, $16),the
second outing from Juneau
Black, the pen name of the au-
thors Jocelyn Cole and Sharon
Nagel, was originally self-pub-
lished in 2017. In it, Vera Vixen,
the paper’s star reporter, is inves-
tigating the discovery of old
moose bones in an apple orchard
and trying to clear Joe Elkin, the
coffee shop’s owner as well as the
victim’s husband. She’s also
trying to figure out why a fancy
silver-coated mink has moved to
town.
Black’s books — “Shady Hol-
low,” “Cold Clay” and “Mirror
Lake,” which will be reissued
next month — have become my
favorite new comfort reads. The
plotting is sharp, the prose lean
and the atmosphere pure joy.
Vixen and the rest of the critters
never feel like anthropomorphic
Disney cartoon characters. I
eagerly await a fresh infusion of
Shady Hollow mayhem. 0C RIME/ SARAH WEINMAN
Creature Feature
SARAH WEINMAN’SCrime column
appears twice a month.
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