The Dispatcher: A Novel
Ian Hunt, balding and big-bellied, is a chair jockey in a small-town police department in East Texas. He answers the phone and sometimes dispatches a cop car, but mostly he plays computer solitaire and mourns his daughter, who disappeared years ago. That mystery—Was it abduction? Or murder?—has cored out his life. His wife ditched him. He’s estranged from his son. He inhales Guinness. Then his daughter calls. She’s escaped her abductor; can Daddy rescue her from the bad man? It isn’t that easy. But Hunt is on the trail. The rest of the book is so luridly violent that the publisher’s comparisons to Tarantino and the Coen brothers seem perfectly appropriate. The writing has a sensory feel—the texture of a dress, the gurgle of a drain—but Jahn gets a little carried away, as when he revels in descriptions of body stink, of flicking belly-button lint and washing in saliva (somebody else’s). Still, the chases, the gun battles, and the images of a sun-blasted land add up to a stunning read. But not before dinner. --Don Crinklaw