Book - Suburban Dicks
With the book out now, thanks to Titan Books, Steve Taylor-Bryant headed out of town to read the debut novel by Deadpool co-creator Fabian Nicieza, Suburban Dicks...
Andie Stern thought she’d solved her final homicide. Once a budding FBI profiler, she gave up her career to raise her four (soon to be five) children in West Windsor, New Jersey. But one day, between soccer games and trips to the local pool, Andie pulls into a gas station – and stumbles across a murder scene. An attendant has been killed, and the bumbling local cops are in way over their heads.
Suddenly, Andie is obsessed with the case, and back on the trail of a killer, this time with kids in tow.
She soon crosses paths with disgraced local journalist Kenny Lee, who also has everything to prove in solving the case. A string of unusual occurrences – and, eventually, body parts – surfaces around town, and Andie and Kenny uncover simmering racial tensions and a decades-old conspiracy.
There is much to love in Fabian Nicieza’s crime novel. There are the very prescient cultural issues that make up huge parts of the plot and the very generational and geographical reactions to those, there is also an incredibly well thought out mystery to solve that keeps a level of intrigue in the reader long past when many other crime novels wain slightly. There is also a cast of main characters whose number of flaws rival the impressive page count of the book but, most importantly to me, there is a level of snark and cynicism and sarcasm rarely found in writing in recent times. The dialogue plays out between characters as it would sound between me and my friends and the inner monologue of the two main characters, Andie Stern and Kenneth Lee, presents as a Hunter S. Thompson commentary on more than one occasion.
I guess what I’m saying is that Nicieza has brought a lot of his ideas and characteristics from his mature comic book world and implanted them on everyday people in this book in way that is so highly appealing it’s ridiculous. This isn’t a crusty old detective trope repacked as something new, Suburban Dicks is fresh and interesting and asks questions and entertains in equal measure and I demand another one now!
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