Review: A long way from Fargo
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 29, 2012
A jaded FBI agent is sent to Northern Minnesota to investigate the execution style murder of a fifteen year old. The locals are a bunch of hicks. The town is named Crayton but vandals spray painted the sign on the way into town so it reads "Crazytown." Special Agent Darren Lockhart likes to remind people how important he is any chance he gets. That includes the local cops.Lockhart also likes to eat and the story goes into great detail describing the contents of his meals. Lockhart's supervisor seems to be setting him up to fail, refusing to disclose details of a government dossier on a person of interest. At least the town has a significant number of bars so Lockhart can drown his sorrows in alcohol.The killer, who happens to be a serial murderer of 30 victims, appears in a few first person interludes. If you are wondering what makes him tick, the answer lies elsewhere. Somehow Lockhart never catches a glimpse of the perp skulking around the tiny town.Lockhart has no shortage of suspects but can't pin the crime on any of them. Fortunately, the real killer starts knocking them off, so by the end he is the last man standing. Lockhart solves the case by deduction, as in subtraction.Then, without warning, the genre changes from police procedural to science fiction.Technical and craft issues were abundant. Formatting errors produced variable margin widths throughout. I spotted a number of typos. The writing often lapsed into a weak, passive style. The dialogue was stilted and unconvincing. The arrival of a fire fighting helicopter a few minutes after a house exploded seemed beyond belief for an area so remote that it didn't appear on Lockhart's smart phone GPS.