Up today, a debut novel, complete with severed hand, from Leo Banks: Double Wide.
So, let’s try something. Let’s pretend you used to be a very successful minor league pitcher, setting all sorts of records and pitching perfectly. You’ve made a name for yourself, the big leagues have called, and your face is all over magazines and sports talk shows. But your best friend has a drug problem, and, when you are sharing a house on a beach in Mexico and get raided by the cops, the police assume that because your friend has the drugs that surely you’re just as guilty. So you hang out in a Mexican jail for a few years while you wait for the “misunderstanding” be all cleared up.
Then you go home, but there is nothing left. No more baseball jobs. No more money, because you spent it all when you were young and dumb. So, not quite knowing what to do or where to go, you decide it would be a great idea to open up a trailer park in a questionable part of Arizona (questionable because it’s close to the border and in very close proximity to a known drug running trail). You set yourself up in an Airstream, get a few other trailers in various stages of disrepair, and open it up to people who – like you – aren’t quite sure what to do or where to go.
Then, one day, a shoe box lands on your front step, and in the shoe box is a human hand. And you know the hand: it’s the hand of your best friend, the one who is responsible for your stint in a Mexican jail. But he’s still your friend, so you follow tracks of the truck that delivered it up a mountain, where you discover the body of someone else: someone with both of his hands still attached.
So you do what you think is right: you call the police about the body you’ve found on the mountain, but you put your friend’s hand in your storage freezer and decide you’re going to handle that on your own.
How’s it sound? Smart? Probably not. Plausible? Eh, if you live close enough to the Mexican border, yeah, I could see it might be plausible that some shady things happen in your proverbial backyard.
That’s the premise for Double Wide and our protagonist Prospero Stark, aka Whip (his dad is a Shakespeare fan). It evokes, to me, a little bit of a noir vibe. Technically, Whip hasn’t done anything illegal (totally based on my presumption that receiving human hands on your doorstep is not, in and of itself, illegal). Heck, his drink of choice is a glass of milk. He takes in stray humans and helps feed them, keeps them safe, keeps tabs on what they’re up to. He genuinely wants to find out what happened to his friend. All good things.
But Whip has a propensity for getting into tight spots and maybe not quite getting out of them cleanly. I mean, literally, he escapes from one scenario by stabbing at someone with a cactus (which sounds, to me, like a pretty horrible yet effective method). He says nothing of the hand in his freezer to the police, and takes some friends – new and old – on hunts for evidence and people and answers. It’s a little vigilante-esque, and maybe that’s what feels noir about it.
Whip’s dad has issues, and I thought for sure there would be some kind of tie-in with that to the main story line. If there was, it was really subtle and I completely missed it. So I’m not really sure what purpose he served, unless it was to just give Whip something else to think about. And one of Whip’s “tenants” appears frequently but not for any real reason I could tell, unless the whole purpose was to give Whip an excuse to drive around. I was a little disappointed – my mind came up with some ideas for how it would be all connected in the end, but there was no connection. If the dad is going to show up so often, though, I really think it should have been for a purpose. But that’s just my opinion.
At the end of the day, this was a quick read. The story moves at quickly. There is no unnecessary romance (thank you very much). Almost all of the characters are flawed in some way (hello, noir genre). There are drug smugglers, cops who really liked their college Shakespeare classes, a few down-on-their-luck friends, and a few shady-but-probably-nice-
So, if you can buy into the idea that this is not completely ridiculous then you’ll probably enjoy it.
Luckily for me, I can totally buy into that idea.
Overall: 7/10
Rebekah Papadakis
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