THREE SISTERS

The 12th helping of Doss’s screwball logic and witticisms from the mouths of a seven-foot Ute, his blackmailing auntie and a platoon of wacky sidekicks.

Andrew Turner had two wives. The first was eaten by pigs, the second by bears. After a brief marriage to the second wife’s sister, Andrew came to a peculiar end. He was either scared by wisps of ectoplasm into driving off a cliff or carried off by a hairy sasquatch—or none of the above. To help his best pal Scott Parris, Granite Creek police chief, figure out which, Ute rancher/tribal investigator Charlie Moon (Stone Butterfly, 2006, etc.) lets himself be deputized, which would be a grand idea if only it had prevented a third sister, a dubious psychic, from dying too. Charlie’s Aunt Daisy, who often made up premonitions herself when she got tired of waiting for them to come to her, adds a few tart words and scrambles the plot to a fare-thee-well. And skinny Sarah Frank, the teenager with a behemoth crush on Charlie, has a moment of glory when he admits he needs her. But the real showstopper is the sasquatch herself, carting around something that looks like a stuffed burrito and desperate to learn her letters so that she can read romance novels.

A belly-laugh primer that breaks every rule in the mystery genre, something for which Doss’s fans should be eternally grateful.