I'm drawn to stories of losers in small-town America, and Denis Carroll is nothing if not a small-town American loser. By "loser," I mean "someone who means well and wants what everybody else wants but has a compass that spins round and round when it comes time to settle on a direction," as if there are too many magnetic attractions around to distract him. (And it's almost always a him, isn't it?)

Denis is a part-owner of a failing bar from which he deals weed in Belleview, which seems to be set in Illinois or maybe Missouri. He's got a wife and twin sons, but seems distant from them, as though he doesn't understand why he might deserve them. As A TASTE OF SHOTGUN opens, he is picking up his younger brother Vince, a true screwup who took the fall for a killing committed by Denis in self-defense and served four years in a prison for crimes related to that botched armed robbery of the bar. Vince's return to town sets into a motion a chain of events that involve old family grudges, financial shakedowns, and, soon, a rising body count.

Through it all, Chris Orlet keeps things light on their feet through the darkness, maintaining a dry sense of workingman's humor in Denis's voice: “Name me one record you don’t want to stomp to bits with hobnail boots after you hear it ninety-five times. Even ‘Wichita Lineman’ can’t hold up to that many playings.”

A TASTE OF SHOTGUN is an enjoyable novel by an author of no small talent. Orlet has a pitch-perfect eye and ear for the woes of people just barely keeping a nostril above the surface in a never-ending struggle for financial and psychological survival.

And yet, it could have been better. Some of Denis's assumptions and choices — taking seriously a ridiculous blackmail threat — were so dumb that I had a hard time believing that even someone as prone to bad decisions as Denis would buy in. And the novel gives needless short shrift to its secondary characters (especially a duplicitous female bartender and a fellow parolee who hangs around with Vince), and in doing so, makes them seem they exist only to serve the plot, and it's never good to let so much of the scaffolding of a story show when it's a finished structure. At the end, I was reminded of a line that Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film RESERVOIR DOGS: "Now that he's made a good movie, it's time for him to make a better one."4 s Rory CostelloAuthor 18 books16

Often very funny, and true to the "noir" tradition in that its central characters are terminal screwups who get themselves deeper and deeper into horrible fixes. The more they try to dig themselves out, the worse it gets. Benefits from its setting in redneck Illinois, with realistic descriptions of how the local economy has been hollowed out. Also benefits from the exclusion of the very played-out theme of meth.3 s Paul McBride1,332 17

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