Sugar on the Bones by Joe R. Lansdale

 

(pb; 2024: thirteenth novel in the Hap and Leonard series)

 

From the back cover

“Minnie Polson is dead. Burned to a crisp in a fire so big and bad it had to be deliberate. The only thing worse is that Hap and Leonard could have prevented it. Maybe. Minnie had a feeling she was being targeted, shaken down by some shadowy force. However, when she’d solicited Hap & Leonard, all it took was one off color joke to turn her sour and she’d called them off the investigation. Wracked with a guilty conscience, the two PIs—along with Hap’s fleet-footed wife, Brett—tuck in to the case. As they look closer, they dredge up troublesome facts: for one, Minnie’s daughter, Alice, has recently vanished. She’d been hard up after her pet grooming business went under and was in line to collect a whopping insurance sum should anything happen to her mother. The same was due to Minnie’s estranged husband, Al, whose kryptonite (beautiful, money-grubbing women) had left him with only a run-down mobile home. But did Minnie’s foolish, cash-strapped family really have it in them to commit a crime this grisly? Or is there a larger, far more sinister scheme at work?”

 

 

Review

Sugar, Lansdale’s follow-up to the last Hap and Leonard [H&P] novel, The Elephant of Surprise (2019), finds the longtime friends, along with Brett (Hap’s wife) investigating a suspicious arson-murder case, with (possible) help from friends (or frenemies) from past H&P novels and stories. These characters include: Jim Bob, Vanilla Ride, Veil and Kung Fu Bobby.

Reading a H&P story is like visiting old friends—they’re raw, sometimes salty and scary, but always interesting and sincere in their intentions, and Sugar is no exception. There’s plenty of quip-quotable dialogue, raw action, hissable villains, fully realized and often warm frenemies/friend, though this time out it feels like it “H&P and friends” reunion, with a few new characters. It’s also, like other books in this series, a burn-through read, tonally falling somewhere between darker and recent lighter H&P fare. If the last third ran a bit long for me, it might be because I listened to this an audiobook and wasn’t doing my usual series-beat-familiar fast/physical book read. Worth owning, this, as are other H&P works, book- and television-wise. Followed, in book form, by Hatchet Girls.