Enjoyable byplay between detective and his daughter. Bit southern noir, but pulp fiction. Violence a bit high for me, could have done
Without the torture, but definitely will be back for more ( )

In Jason Miller’s “Red Dog,” Slim has quite a number of mysteries to solve. 1) Why did the Cleaves seek out and hire him? 2) Who stole the dog he was asked to find and 3) why? 4) Who killed Dennis Reach and 5) why? 6) Why did A Evan Cleaves give him $100,000? 7) Who set fire to his house and 8) why?

I think by the end of the book most of the mysteries were solved but the plot was so opaque and the process meanders so much I can’t be sure. The answers to numbers one and six are not clear in my mind and it only hours since I finished reading the book.

Jason Miller is a clever quipster. His inventive dialogue and narrative keeps you engaged paragraph by paragraph, but he is not a coherent storyteller. While characters like Slim, Anci, and Jeep Mabry are interesting, and his villains are bizarre, his plots are hard to follow and, ultimately, unconvincing. As a consequence, “Red Dog,” and his earlier novel, “Down Don’t Bother me” failed to hold my interest. Slim deserves a better milieu.

The temptation in a series is to repeat aspects of the earlier stories. In “Red Dog” Slim is again jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. Jeep Mabry, “the reigning Most Dangerous Man in Little Egypt,” again serves as his backup and, at critical points, his “get out of jail free” card. Anci is once again smarter, more mature, and smug than Slim. It’s funny when we learn that she saved Slim by installing an app on his phone intended to allow parents to keep track of their kids. Later she gets her comeuppance. But the supporting characters are given little to do and mostly appear at critical points to function as “get out of jail free” cards.

At points the plot is obscure and the actions of Slim and other characters too hard to understand. Countering that, some of the characters and Miller’s comments about the characters are downright funny. I’m coming to the conclusion that readers have to forgive a lot if they want to read Jason Miller’s Slim in Little Egypt series. ( )