Say it ain’t so, Joe! After 36 years and 15 novels (not to mention short stories, graphic novels and a TV series), Edgar Award-winning author Joe R. Lansdale is retiring his indomitable duo, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine.
At Petrified Dreams’ opening, the two are already retired from the detective business, or so they think. It seems only fitting that the pair’s final case drops into their laps as if out of the clear blue. Literally. While Hap and Leonard are out fishing on a private Texas lake, a prop plane plummets from the sky mere feet from their boat. On board is a group of kidnapped women, most of whom are already dead when the plane hits the water. But one passenger, a young woman named Dakota, emerges from the wreckage alive.
Sadly, she doesn’t stay that way for long, and her sister shows up both to identify the body and to engage Hap and Leonard’s help in finding the killer—or killers—because the cops don’t seem much interested.
The trail leads them first to a tech bro named Charlie Dickerson, who has a taste for teen girls and outsider art, neither of which bodes well for the grudging gumshoes. It turns out that the plane’s human cargo was raw material for a shadowy malevolence known to Dickerson merely as The Artist. But make no mistake, this guy ain’t no Prince. While Hap and Leonard hope their encounter will lead to the police apprehending The Artist, luck doesn’t seem to be breaking their way.
Smarter or less dedicated or more lackadaisical interlopers would just walk away at this point, but when the trail heats up and points them toward a Louisiana swamp outside the local cops’ jurisdiction, the pair channels their inner Batman and Robin—or, as they style themselves later, Top Cat and Pussycat—to bring the “elephant of surprise” crashing down upon the miscreants.
Elements of The Silence of the Lambs and Rambo combine for terror and testosterone in abundance, earning Hap and Leonard the opportunity to exit their longtime vocation on a satisfying note. While the author has made it clear that he’s calling it quits on his best-known creations, his postscript leaves the door open just the tiniest crack in case Hap says, “You know what, Lansdale, I have one more story to tell you.”
We can only hope.
