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RED JACKET
by Joseph Heywood
Globe Pequot Press, September 2012
432 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0762782536


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Review: It's 1913 on Michigan's Upper Pennisula and struggling wildlife trapper, Lute Bapcat's life is suddenly changed when he is appointed game warden at the behest of his fellow Rough Rider, former President Theodore Roosevelt. While Lute expects his new career to consist of citing locals for hunting out of season, a slew of bizarre mass killings of local game dovetails with a looming strike at a local mine and with the local police being reluctant to investigate the powerful mine operators; Lute, accompanied by his loyal assistant Zakov, a Russian emigrant with a strange sense of humor and the Widow Frei, a local businesswoman and Lute's part-time lover, seeks to uncover the truth behind the strange happenings in Red Jacket.

Author Joseph Heywood's Lute Bapcat is a likable character who is appropriately surrounded by a sprawling cast of colorful characters whose outlandish names are matched only by their outsized personalities (though if anything, the vast array of characters can be confusing and overwhelming at times). Heywood also utilizes historical figures such as Roosevelt and George Gipp in small roles that manage to avoid being distracting or too cute by half, as happens too often when real-life figures are given cameos in a fictionalized narrative. Heywood gives readers real situations and characters while never distracting from the central narrative at hand.

RED JACKET's narrative focuses on a strike and the violent and cruel means that some will go to in order to get their desired ends, culminating in a tragic incident in Christmas Eve. In many ways, with the role of labor unions being a topic de jour in North America and Europe in the past few years, Heywood is able to evoke the Zeitgeist, which makes his story have even more resonance.

If the book has a flaw though, it is its lack of ambiguity regarding who is on the moral high ground in the labor dispute. As well, a crucial event that comes very late in the novel, together with the relatively brief space Heywood devotes to tying up the loose ends make the ending a little less satisfying than it could be.

Notwithstanding such minor qualms, RED JACKET still stands as an excellent historical novel and a promising start to what obviously Heywood hopes to be a series. Whether a fan of crime fiction or a general fiction reader of solid character-driven historical fiction, both the nature enthusiast and the dedicated bookworm can enjoy without hesitation Lute Bapcat's first adventure.

§ Ben Neal is a public librarian in northeastern Tennessee and likes to fancy himself an amateur writer, humorist, detective, and coffee connoisseur in his spare time. He can be reached at beneneal@indiana.edu.

Reviewed by Ben Neal, September 2012

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