No Regrets, Coyote (Wylie Coyote Melville 1) - Softcover

Dufresne, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846689759 ISBN 13: 9781846689758

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2014

Synopsis

For readers of Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane, a South Florida noir from the best-selling author of Louisiana Power & Light.

On Christmas Eve in Eden, Florida, Wylie “Coyote” Melville, therapist and forensic consultant, is summoned to a horrific crime scene. Five members of the Halliday family have been brutally killed. Wylie’s rare talent is an ability to read a crime scene, consider the evidence seen and unseen, and determine what’s likely to have happened. The police are soon convinced that the deaths were a murder-suicide carried out by a broken and desperate Chafin Halliday, but Wylie’s not so sure.

As Wylie begins his own investigation with the help of his friend Bay Lettique―a poker-playing sleight-of-hand artist with links to the Everglades County underworld―he discovers a web of corruption involving the police union, Ponzi-scheming lawyers, county politicians, and the Russian mob. What follows is a heart-stopping, edgy novel that introduces a completely original crime solver.

About this title

About the Author:

John Dufresne is the author of ten previous books, including two fiction writing guides. A professor in the MFA program at Florida International University, he lives in Dania Beach.

From Booklist:

Dufresne’s second crime novel (after Louisiana Power and Light, 1994) is another offbeat tour through the South (this time, Florida). The narrator-sleuth has the cringe-inducing name Wylie “Coyote” Melville. The premise hangs on Coyote’s supposed ability to read crime scenes at a glance; a detective sergeant within the Eden Police Department invites Coyote to look at and return to scenes, though Coyote is not a cop; he’s a therapist. The problem is that Coyote demonstrates very little of this intriguing skill; we get one scene in which he plays Holmes analyzing a room, but the rest we take on faith. The mystery here is that of a supposed murder-suicide, in which a wealthy restaurant owner apparently killed his wife and kids before turning the gun on himself. Coyote has a sense that the man was also a victim, and his search for the killer expands into the Florida underworld. A solid mystery and a provocative narrative voice make up for insufficient evidence of this forensic consultant’s skills. --Connie Fletcher

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1846689759
• ISBN 13: 9781846689758
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352