But he solves the mystery swiftly-almost abruptly-before being presented with another one. Instead, he offers her condolences and a place to stay while she’s in town.Īs clues begin to pile up, Walker grows increasingly taciturn, not sharing his theories of the case with anyone. (Once again, that assumption is disproved, in a surprising but satisfying way.) Even readers’ expectations about tough detectives in mystery novels are periodically challenged Walker neglects to ask for the identification of a woman who walks into the crime scene and claims to be a relative of Mrs. When the body of one of the four victims in the van, a teenager named Jose Marotta, disappears from the funeral home, Walker wonders aloud if it’s because Marotta was a drug mule and the drugs had to be recovered from his stomach. Walker is not immune to baseless conjectures. Bickers thinks she needs protection from defies her expectations. “Now you’re taking my protection away,” she says, echoing, almost perfectly, the periodic complaints of right-wingers in this country, especially after the election of Barack Obama. Bickers because she fired two shots through her door when she “heard a noise,” waking up the whole neighborhood.

To complicate matters, FBI agents turn up at Walker’s door to let him know that the man from the picture is one of their own, working undercover.īut in Everett’s hands, this murder mystery is complicated at every step by the assumptions that Walker and others around him make about murder victims, criminals and the police, and about race, religion and sexual orientation. Then the bodies of four men are discovered, apparently smothered to death in the back of a stolen van.

Bickers’s house: the deed to a parcel of land, where Walker will find dozens of holes in the ground-evidence that someone was looking for something.

Erasure by Percival Everett