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Dead Bang: An Art Hardin Mystery

Robert E. Bailey
M. Evans & Company, Inc. (2007)
ISBN 9781590771099
Reviewed by R. J. Brown for RebeccasReads (3/08)

From a Mob hit thirty years ago on the outskirts of Detroit to a fight over a piece of luggage at an airport carousel, “Dead Bang” lopes around the Wolverine State, leaving a trail of bullets, fires, loose cash, kidnappings and bodies.

This is the third Art Hardin Mystery, so there’s some catching-up to do, although “Dead Bang” ably stands alone, like the proverbial last man.

I really enjoyed meeting Art and Wendy, longtime married PIs, with their own separate companies and an amusing and familiar repartee. Both being of a certain age, they have history, and in Art's case, something he was working on as a young man, suddenly comes back to bite him.

Art is at a meet with Mark Behler, a local news anchor who’s outspokenly anti-gun on his shows and says he has a lead into that long ago Mob hit. When a middle-aged woman comes in and starts shooting, Art, being a concealed weapons carrier and a firm believer in the Second Amendment, shoots back, accurately. Mark rushes to the woman's side with his tape recorder still going. Just as she expires, she says something which makes him very uneasy, and leads him to convince Art to help him legally get a gun, under the guise of showing his TV audience just how easy it is. Turns out it isn’t easy, which frustrates the newsman to no end.

Later, when Wendy is driving Art to the airport to pick up Karen Smith, someone Art had been hired to protect a few years back, and whom they had kind of adopted (and whom we might have met in either “Private Heat” or “Dying Embers”) returns from a Caribbean vacation towing her latest lover, a comedian of Middle Eastern extract, and a suitcase of lovely new undies. Then Art and lover Manny fight over the bag and it rips open. It’s packed with used American money -- the chase is on.

Sometimes it’s Art and Wendy doing the chasing, and sometimes it’s the bad guys with their arsenal and cell of back-up thugs. All the time “Dead Bang” is fast, lively and surprisingly informative and ingenious. I especially enjoyed the insights into Detroit’s past and present, the married with older children focus, and the different perspective that one FBI agent, raised in Egypt and America, brings to the mix.

“Dead Bang” has some things to say about good guys and bad and terrorism, about the sorry state of a once-great industrial region, about gun ownership and misuse, and living long enough to gain some maturity. It also has some great punch-lines.

If you like your mysteries peppered with the bizarre and hilarious, with side dishes of history, then “Dead Bang” is a dead-on read for you!


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