Something for everybody today. The return of a popular crime series, a first story collection, Ojibwe memoir, and flesh-eating as metaphor for female outrage.
(Courtesy of Crooked Lane Books)
“The Deepest Cut”: by P.J. Tracy (Crooked Lane Books, $29.99)
She threw up her hands in frustration. “We don’t have to talk, it’s obvious to everyone who knows that your mind isn’t right. Mercy, Harley, we’re family, the only family any of us has ever had. We spent ten years of our lives running from a serial killer, and we survived because we had each other.” — from “The Deepest Cut”
Wolfgang Mauer has escaped from a maximum security mental hospital in rural Minnesota and he wants revenge on the Monkeewrench gang of cyber-sleuths who got the evidence that put him in prison. The four friends have never been in more danger because Mauer is brilliant and sadistic.
It’s good to have the gang back in the 11th in this series that began in 2019 with “Ice Cold Heart” by Traci Lambrecht and her mother, P.J. Lambrecht, writing as P.J. Tracy. It’s a series that combines humor with deadly plots, all wrapped around the Monkeewrenchers — Harley Davidson, who owns their headquarters mansion in St. Paul; Grace McBride, so damaged emotionally and psychologically in the early books that she was paranoid about her safety; Annie Belinsky, fashionista and mother hen; and Roadrunner, a tall, very thin bike enthusiast. They’re joined in their sometimes law-skirting investigations by detectives Gino Rolseth, who loves food, and Leo Magozzi, who’s announced his retirement. Leo and Grace have a 2-year-old daughter adored by the gang. And Roadrunner is in love, surprising everyone.
When “Wolfie” Mauer does the impossible and escapes from the mental hospital, he is on the way to hide out in his mother’s opulent home when he picks up a poor kid named Travis, much to the chagrin of his mother, a former assassin. When an inexperienced but smart woman county sheriff finds three bodies, she and the Monkeewrenchers join a national search for Mauer. The gang is so concerned about their safety that they send Grace and her daughter into hiding. They’re helped in their search by the Beast, a supercomputer they built that analyzes data in minutes.
Throughout the story there are hints of ways Leo’s police department colleagues are sending him into retirement, including a cop jumping out of a cake wearing only a thong. Leo’s appalled; Geno looks forward to eating. And Roadrunner doesn’t know how to handle his new relationship.
The Lambrechts won most every crime/mystery award for this series, including a Minnesota Book Award. After P.J.’s death in 2016, Traci wrote two more Monkeewrench books, then began a series featuring Detective Margaret Nolan, set in Los Angeles where Traci lived for several years. It isn’t necessary to have read the previous Monkeewrench books to enjoy this one.
Lambrecht will discuss “The Deepest Cut” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Once Upon a Crime, 604 W. 26th St., Mpls.
(Courtesy of McSweeney’s)
“Martha’s Daughter”: by David Haynes (McSweeney’s, $26)
“She’s hard to describe,” I mumble to Janine. And I swallow as I mumble, in hopes that this might sound to her as if my voice had broken with grief… And it’s a lie, of course. Brilliant, manipulative, domineering, mean: I could describe my mother for days. I have zero desire to do so. — from “Martha’s Daughter”
In his first story collection, former Minnesotan Haynes gives us a stunning novella of a daughter and her domineering mother and 10 stories, ranging from two mothers concerned about their Black sons to a woman who’s sure her husband is in the hands of a temptress, and an aging superhero who has kept the neighborhood safe. As in his seven novels, Haynes’ characters belong to the Black middle class. Most live in an all-Black suburb of St. Louis, where Haynes lives after teaching at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“Martha’s Daughter,” the novella, takes place as Cynthia heads to the funeral home to make arrangements for her mother Martha’s funeral. She’s isn’t sad; her mother had “a personal brand of nasty” and their relationship was fraught. All this comes out as Cynthia lets her clingy white colleague, Janine, accompany her. Cynthia herself can be salty, as when she thinks of Janine, whom she hired: “…poor Janine — the limp hair, the sometimes too coarse laugh, the upper-left canine that ought to have been corrected by braces.” Yet Janine seems to truly care about Cynthia, sharing stories abut her mother. Throughout the story, it seems Cynthia is speaking to white people, exposing color and class divides between Black and white folks and in the Black community.
We meet Martha again in the story “The Weight of Things,” in which senile Martha invades the home of a recently widowed neighbor, handling items she might sell at one of her famous garage sales, even though she’s mentally incapable of doing that.
The gentlest and most heartbreaking story is “On the American Heritage Trail,” set in a seedy motel that’s home to a prostitute and young South American men who hang drywall, all of whom pay by the month. That includes Mrs. Ralph Wallingford, reminded by sympathetic night clerk Humphrey that she’s behind on her rent. It’s achingly clear this woman has fallen rungs on the social ladder. She has a list of numbers she dials on the telephone, but there is never an answer. Although these characters lead hardscrabble lives, they look out for one another, and Mrs. Wallingford faces her uncertain future with dignity.
Haynes was a middle-school teacher in several St. Paul schools while he was writing his debut novel, “Right by My Side,” published in 2023 in a special 30th anniversary edition in the Penguin Classics series. He got a boost early in his career when his humorous story “Taking Miss Kezee to the Polls” (set in St. Paul and included in this collection) won the first fiction contest sponsored by the Twin Cities City Pages alternative newspaper. He graduated from Macalester College and has a master’s degree from Hamline University.
“Martha’s Daughter” is the first original work in McSweeney’s Of the Diaspora series, described by the publisher as “works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery, and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past.”
(University of Minnesota Press)
“Sugar Bush Babies: Stories of My Ojibwe Grandmother”: by Janis A. Fairbanks (University of Minnesota Press, $17.95)
I imagined they were thinking of the old days, when there was more to being an Indian than coming to a carnival to be a spectacle for the crowds. Only sometimes I would think that way. Other times, I would just go into the circle and dance and forget about anything else except the beat of the drums and the feeling of warmth that surrounded me when I looked at the faces of the other dancers. — from “Sugar Bush Babies”
This memoir is filled with the author’s love for her grandmother, Cecelia Robinson, who lived on a quiet homestead on the allotment property she had inherited on the shores of Big Lake on the Fond du Lac reservation.
Fairbanks, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, spent her early years living on the Leech Lake reservation in Bena. She was an outdoor child, loving the wild flowers and carefree life. But then her family moved from their log cabin to Duluth, where young Janis was surrounded for the first time by white people. She kept running away from kindergarten until her parents worked out a compromise: If she would stay in school, she could spend free time living with her grandmother in her cozy cabin without electricity or running water.
Fairbanks writes of those happy times helping her grandmother do the laundry by hand, working in the garden and listening to family lore, including her grandmother’s time at an Indian boarding school where her culture was forbidden. She taught Janis how proper Indian girls behave. For instance, when Janis danced at a pow-wow, she was to step slowly and carefully and not, her grandmother warned, the way some of the young people were dancing with a more lively step that Janis thought was like “the bop.” And there are flashbacks to her father’s days as a lumberjack and her mother’s special powers.
Fairbanks is involved in preserving and revitalizing the Ojibwe language and mentors a writers group.
“What Hunger”: by Catherine Dang (Simon & Schuster, $27.99)
Ronny Nguyen is furious at everything that has happened in her teen life. Her beloved brother Tommy, preparing to attend a prestigious college, is killed. She is raped, half-drunk, at a party and bites off a piece of her attacker’s ear. She enjoys the feeling of the chewy flesh and taste of salty blood. Her Vietnamese family bonds over food, especially meat that was hard for her parents to get as refugees, so it’s not surprising Ronny’s fury manifests in her need for meat that fills the vengeful place in her heart..
Although “What Hunger” is sometimes hard to read, it’s named a most anticipated horror book of 2025 by Book Riot, She Reads, Our Culture and Crime Reads; is listed in Library Journal’s Top Ten August books; and earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly Booklist (“Intense, visceral, and not to be missed”).
Dang is a University of Minnesota graduate who lives in Brooklyn.
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