August Snow #4
Stephen Mack Jones, creator of August Snow – Detroit’s Mexican-African American knight in shining armor – wants to ponder, in his fourth novel, the cost of doing what’s morally right, no matter what. As the book opens, August is visiting his girlfriend’s family in Sweden but while there, he seems to have tracked down and caught a serial killer. That’s just the first chapter. He gets an urgent call from his sometime housemate, Lucy Three Rivers, that her adoptive mothers are in crisis. One of them is in the hospital with a heart problem.
Lucy is a young woman August basically scraped off the streets, and she’s a techno whiz. She’s using her tech talent at the moment to help her “mom” even though she now has a “straight” job. She’s also willing to go off reservation for August. Lucy sees no wrong in what she’s doing, for her, it’s the right thing, no matter the consequence. Her right and wrong boundaries are squishy.
While visiting the hospital, August overhears a heated conversation (or part of one) between his family priest, Father Grabowski, and a remarkably sinister looking man. While he’s not sure exactly what’s up, his concern intensifies when he finds the good father passed out drunk when he stops by one morning. He sobers him up and gets him to talk.
I don’t want to give away too much of this complicated and twisty plot, but Father Grabowski also has things he’s done in the past “for the right reason” that he now regrets. The Father’s moral boundaries, as a Catholic cleric, are not so squishy as Lucy’s. August has two tasks in this book: figuring out what the Father did, and protecting him from harm as there seem to be some very lethal folks looking for him. Just protecting him proves difficult enough.
August, meanwhile, pretty much daily grapples with the amount of violence that he must use to accomplish his ends – often “doing what’s right,” but it still feels wrong. All of these conundrums -from Lucy’s to Grabowski’s to August’s daily battle with the dark side of the world – are a matter of degree, but all are ultimately the same question. For August it’s begun to impact his relationship with his girlfriend, Tatina. They are not married but shared a “commitment” ceremony in the last novel (Dead of Winter, 2021).
This book of course is not a polemic. Jones is a very quotable and funny writer, and he’s great with sidebar characters, of whom there are many. He’s a bit like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser – on steroids. Even Spenser took a chill pill every now and then. August shares Spenser’s love of the finer things in fashion as well as the finer things in food, chowing down everything from chili tacos to donuts to swigging down a good amount of bourbon. These books are nothing if not a great cultural food tour of Detroit.
If these books were any different in tone, I’d almost categorize them as cozy, with August’s circle of supportive friends and neighbors and the food tours. However, the level of violence and intrigue puts them into a darker place. I love August, even though he sometimes veers toward the super-human. I’m glad he’s around though, and I enjoyed this trip through the darker recesses of the Catholic church. This was a fast and fun read. — Robin Agnew