PONY GIRLS
by Richard Hoyt
Denson, Dancer, and Sees the Night (The Weatherman’s Daughter, 2003, etc.) are hired to rope in a serial killer stalking stallions.
Ex-reporter John Denson, ex–FBI agent Annie Dancer, hallucinatory drug maven Willie Sees the Night are soft-boiled dicks operating out of Portland, Oregon—operating, as usual, in a style uniquely their own. Sees the Night, for instance, is a shaman, a crack out-of-body investigator who does his best work after imbibing certain controlled substances. Twenty-two valuable stallions have been murdered in diverse ways on the hooves of 16 European jumping horses. Are the two sets of horrors actually one? And are they connected to the beaching of 41 sperm whales? Denson, at his office/home in Whorehouse Meadow, gets a call from peerless TV journalist Erika von Bayer seeking help. Her dad, though defunct, remains a leading suspect in this hairiest of horse operas, and she wants his name cleared. Turns out the family album is chock-full of leading suspects: Erika’s loopy mom, her vengeful grandmom, plus the gorgeous, dubious TV queen herself. Will Denson, Dancer, and winged Willie sort it all out? Not until after the customary jazzy sorties into what might or might not be a parallel reality.
Plotless, aimless, relentlessly silly. Only the most charitable readers will suspend disbelief.