The Lenient Beast

Fredric Brown's masterful mystery novel (which I read in one sitting) is a skillfully written tale featuring multiple first person perspectives. Fully developed characters and absoultely dead-on, realistic dialog kept me engaged throughout. Brown touches on a range of human issues such as interracial marriage, anti-semitism and alchoholism in a truthful manner and weaves this into a murder mystery laden with psychological torment, a la Jim Thompson. This is simply one of the best books I've read in a long time.

This novel of serial killings garners its strength from the bluntness and crispness of Brown's narrative; this is a detective novel with no moody lighting, no one-liners and no super cool hero. Each chapter presents a different view point, yet each latches onto the previous chapter to create a stifling tale of a week in a small town in the US south with a killer on the lose. This is the literary equivalent of Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth or Mystery Train - this is Pynchon rather than Spillane.