small-town, small-business, court-reporter, crime-fiction, maine, investigation, suspense*****

Following Jack the journalist into another dangerous investigation is a thrill ride of danger full of surprising twists and red herrings. It's Maine near the end of the last century, but some things have changed little and crime even less. A good read!
Michael A. Smith is a really fine narrator and easy to understand, as well. ( )

McMorrow and the beautiful love of his life, Roxanne, attend a Country Life Fair out in the Maine sticks on a Saturday afternoon. Tucked among the back-to-the-earth folks are some colorful people hawking petitions for the legalization of marijuana. Bobby Mullaney and his wife, Melanie, seem rather interesting, and Jack sees the possibility of pitching their story to an editor friend at the Boston Globe. Bobby and Melanie have a scary ex-con sidekick, known only as Coyote, who hangs with them, but that doesn't scare our hero, Jack McMorrow. Readers of earlier books know he isn't afraid of a hard case or two, although he may take precautions, like carrying his rifle and some bullets on his travels, or calling in his ex-Marine buddy, Clair, to ride shotgun. He ends up resorting to both of these tactics in Potshot, but nearly gets killed anyway. He meets Bobby's friends, who are pushing for legalization,and they seem a bit ditzy, but mainly law-abiding New Englanders. There's still something off-center about Bobby and Coyote, though, as Jack finds out when he visits their place and they show him their plants growing in the woods. They're not dealing a lot, but they're dealing. Jack wrestles with his own feelings about legalization and about revealing identities of these folks in his writings, but those issues are put on hold when he gets a frantic call from Melanie about Bobby's disappearance. It seems he and Coyote went off to a nearby city to collect a drug debt and didn't come home. Jack rushes off in the same direction to find out what happened, nearly gets dented by some druggies with metal pipes, and escapes with the information that Bobby and Coyote have ventured to a mean old industrial town in Massachusetts to meet with a bigger guy in the drug pipeline and retrieve their money. Jack rushes off again, but this time he takes Clair along. The two foil an attempt on their lives by a gang, and are disgustedly leaving town when they catch a local news broadcast about a charred corpse found in a charred car just like the one Bobby was driving. Anything else about the plot might give away the author's resolution of it, which is both surprising and exciting. One can, at this point, however, carp just a second about pictures of red pickup trucks all aflame on the dustjacket of the book, along with descriptions in the book's text of a body being found in a burned-up white Subaru station wagon. An autophobic artist may not know the difference, but you'd think someone at the publisher's might provide a photograph or two to illustrate that difference. Maybe the pickup looked more Maine-ish than a Subaru wagon. Artist's license, and all that. Roxanne also has quite a time of it in this novel. She is a child welfare social worker, who gets actively and emotionally involved in her job. Too actively in one case, it turns out, which lands her in the hospital with death threats pending from a maniacal woman, who surely has maniacal associates. This was a neat aspect of the book, but it was not very clearly resolved by the end. Maybe it was in a section I read too cursorily, along with the account of a fire in the red pickup. Jack McMorrow is a strong, well-realized character in one of the best detective series of the past decade. May he long prosper in Prosperity, Maine. ( )