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It's that time of year in Calaveras County. Frogs are everywhere - hats, t-shirts, and dead in the streams. Among the dead is this year's major contender for the contest, Buford the Bullfrog. Buford belongs to Dakota Webster, who has won the "Jumping Frog Jubilee" contest for the last several years. Then it's Dakota's turn to be discovered dead in the stream. The narrator, and detective, is Connor Westphal, "the feisty deaf publisher of the weekly Eureka!". She gets involved because of her role as a newspaper person and because her sidekick/main squeeze is hired to find Buford's killer and because her office assistant Jeremiah (who happens to be the son of the sheriff) is suspected of killing Dakota. It turns out that Dakota is not a nice person. He has many enemies, for a wide variety of reasons. For a young man, he's made a lot of people angry with him. Flat Skunk is a small town, with all the secrets and undercurrents one thinks of when one hears the words "small town". Right now, it's a very busy small town, because of the Jubilee, and that makes everyone's life a little more difficult. The traffic is awful, for one thing. Anyone who has ever lived in a town that survives on tourism will empathize with Connor, who is trying to get her paper out and prove Jeremiah innocent. This isn't a bad book. It just isn't a very good book. Connor Westphal is deaf. To be a newspaper editor and deaf must be a considerable challenge in a hearing world. I don't get a sense of that. An inkling, maybe. I know that everyone isn't named "Tom" or "Elizabeth" or "Brittany" or "Seth"; I have a hard time believing that Flat Skunk is peopled almost entirely by men and women whose parents went for the unusual when it came to naming their children, although if the names of all the towns mentioned are real, perhaps I should rethink things. There is a mystery, it can be solved with the clues as given. But about two-thirds of the way into this, I didn't much care. I plan on donating this to my local high school library. Perhaps it will lead someone to Mark Twain.
Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, December 2002
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