Vacation Reading!

Ranchero by Rick Gavin was a hoot.

A little short on plot, but I barely noticed cause the writing is so good and the characters are beyond memorable.

Here's an example of a total throw away character, a dog who appears exactly once in the book:

The neighbor off the back has some kind of short-haired dog with three legs and one eye and a sour disposition.  He looked like a veteran of the Great War.  I know him a little. His name was Rusty.  I'd made his acquaintance a few months back when he'd spent about thirty-six straight hours barking at a stump.  I think Rusty's remaining eye was clouded with cataracts, and just generally Rusty had lost all interest in caring what was what.

The main character Nick Reid is a repo man. He's hunting the ne'er do well who got the drop on him and made off with his borrowed coral colored Ranchero.

Here's what happens at one critical juncture:

Weary now, I raised the shotgun barrel toward the ceiling, more or less aimed it at an orange and black MOWING AHEAD sign, and squeezed off a shell without really thinking just what I was up to.

[I should mention here that the MOWING AHEAD sign is on the ceiling, not on the street.]

Lead pellets would have punched on through, and we'd have been left with just some instructive racket, but the little rubber balls I was shooting stayed in the house and went everywhere fast.  They hit that sign and came back down, bounced all over the place. They filled that room just like a swarm of hornets.

Those pellets hurt so much through my clothes I was doubly glad I wasn't standing around naked. Tommy [who was standing around naked] for his part, balled up on the couch and ducked under his filthy blanket while Eugene [also naked] couldn't think of a thing to do but wail and leap and dance.

"What the hell did you do that for?" Luther wanted to know.

"Crazy son-of-a-bitch," Percy Dwayne added.

Tommy came out from under his blanket to add a few choice words as well. Eugene just whined and flopped around on the floor.

Like most rash things I get up to, that one hadn't been helpful.

Even Desmond, after a great while, told me, "Let's don't be doing that again."

This book conveys place (the Mississippi Delta) so beautifully that I felt like I lived there. The rhythm of the prose is gorgeous, nary a misstep.

It's funny without being comic or over the top, and gorgeously written without standing around admiring itself in the mirror.

I loved it.  You might too.