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Summary
Summary
A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier
Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution.
In Assumption , his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier , Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.
Author Notes
Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of eighteen novels, including I Am Not Sidney Poitier , The Water Cure , Wounded , Erasure , and Glyph .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Everett, who has put his uniquely wacky spin on genres from Greek myths to westerns, does the same for crime fiction in his effective follow-up to I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Deputy Ogden Walker, the son of a black father and a white mother, investigates cases for Sheriff Bucky Paz in a "hick-full, redneck county" of New Mexico. He takes a gun away from elderly Emma Bickers after she alarms neighbors by shooting through her door at an unknown figure. Then four bodies turn up at a camp site, including one Ogden spotted in a photo at Bickers's house. He helps Caitlin Alison, who's come from Ireland, in her search for her missing cousin, Fiona McDonough, living somewhere in the mountains. Finally, at the request of game and fish patrolman Terry Lowell, Walker takes charge of an 11-year-old boy, the nephew of the poacher Lowell just arrested. Walker, who observes that "[n]othing makes people more interesting than their being dead," finds plenty of bodies in this often bleak and shocking tale. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009, etc.) has all the markings of a mystery novel: a detective, a series of crimes, a sense that people and events might be connected in ways that aren't initially evident. At least such are the assumptions of deputy sheriff Ogden Walker, a black man amid the desert of New Mexico, where most others are white, "in that hick-full, redneck county," but are more often distinguished by their drug habits (primarily meth) and lack of teeth, limbs or both. Readers this world through the eyes of Ogden and will agree with his mother that "You're a good man, Ogden. There are not a lot of good men around." But he's not necessarily a good detective, or maybe the very notion of cause-and-effect, the underpinnings of the classic detective novel, is suspect. The book is divided into three cases, each separate from the others, and none really solved in a conventional sense by Walker and his occasional partner Warren (an Indian who refers to Walker as "cowboy"). In fact, each ends abruptly, surprisingly, without culminating in an accumulation of evidence. When the trail of a suspect leads to a series of dead ends, Ogden realizes that "the longer he drove around Denver, asking his stupid questions, the less he knew what he was doing. And he'd only been there a day; how much could he not know in a week?" Ultimately, readers come to suspect that perhaps Ogden doesn't know himself and that neither do those with whom he works and lives. There are recurring motifs--shifting or mistaken identities, women who initially might seem like a suitable wife for Ogden, mothers, disappearing suspects (or bodies), drug conspiracies and big stashes of cash. Yet not until the last couple of pages does anything add up. Fun to read, but frustrating for those who look for the usual pleasures from detective fiction.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
NEW MEXICO is a place of great beauty and great melancholy, and, like all of the American West, a magnet for misfits. Willa Gather captured these aspects in her classic 1927 novel "Death Comes for the Archbishop." Now Percival Everett, author of genre-bending novels like "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" and "Glyph," vividly evokes the same elements in "Assumption," his new trilogy of interwoven murder mysteries. Investigating all three cases is the enigmatic Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff in Plata, a fictional county in the northern part of the state, physically not far from the health farms and art galleries of trendy Taos, but in all other respects a world away. Plata is the opposite of trendy. It's a blink-and-you-missed-it burg of shabby adobe dwellings and aging pickup trucks and trailers like the one Ogden lives in. A trailer may seem an odd home for a law enforcement official, but Ogden's take on life is out of sync with convention. He's no radical, but he's more of a misfit than most, even in a place full of them. He comes by it honestly: his black father, now dead, had "moved to New Mexico from Maryland because there were fewer people and so, necessarily, fewer white people. He hated white people, but not enough to refrain from marrying one." The one he married, Ogden's mother, lives in Plata, near her son. The two of them maintain an odd relationship that caters equally to her feelings of guilt about her dead husband and Ogden's conflicted feelings about himself ("It was hard for a son to think that his father hated half of him"). Ogden goes to his mom for home cooking and counsel, and he relates to her the way he relates to everyone else - cordially, but from a distance. He approaches his job the same way, but exerts himself to behave with zealous professionalism to compensate for the fact that his heart's not really in it. "I like having a job. Not necessarily this job, but a job." And indeed it soon becomes apparent that he's really a cop for want of anything better to do, having drifted into law enforcement after a stint in the armed forces that left him less than gung-ho about Uncle Sam, among other things. "People can say all they want about supporting the troops to make themselves feel better about having other people fight and do their dying for them, but the Army is not full of our best and brightest. That just ain't so." Despite his aloofness, he gets along well enough with his genial, outgoing boss, Sheriff Bucky Paz, and his fellow deputy, Warren, "the only Native member of the department," with whom, now and then, Ogden goes fly-fishing, an activity he greatly enjoys and thinks about a lot. Indeed, fly-fishing and its accessories - reels, rods, lures - form the leit-motif of the novel, representing Ogden's main, or only, passion. There may have been women, but not any more, although something trembles in the air when pretty but fading Jenny Bickers shows up in Plata from Santa Fe, looking for her mother. Jenny's single, an only child, like Ogden, apparently at loose ends, and in her 30s. But her timing is off: when she shows up, Ogden happens to be investigating her mother's murder, with only a few bizarre leads to go on. Subsequent developments remove Jenny from Ogden's orbit entirely. Not to put too fine a point on it, she turns out to be associated with a network of backwoods racists and small-time crooks under investigation by the F.B.I., whose agents pay Ogden an unfriendly call. At this point the bullets start to fly and so does the plot, with a gaggle of alternating good guys and bad guys, who are sometimes hard to tell apart. Soon Ogden is also chasing clues in two other sordid mysteries, one involving a group of prostitutes rebelling against their pimp in Denver's red-light district, and the other centered on a drug smuggling operation in a decrepit hippie commune in the nearby mountains. The pace picks up. Murders multiply, and Ogden briefly becomes the object of an attempted abduction as he finds himself in ever seedier and seamier locales. Everett summons this environment in spare, dry prose that harks back to hard-boiled predecessors like James M. Cain, to whom he slips in a wry homage early on: "It could have been the . . . postman, ringing only once this time." It's an insinuating style, discreet to a fault, with occasional flourishes: "It was a sad casino, he thought, as if someplace there was a casino that was not sad. It was only a few years old, but poorly designed; shoddy building made it look old, run down, even at night with the abundance of neon lighting masking the scars and flaws. There were consistent jobs for locals there, but no prosperity." Ogden flogs his aging Ford Bronco to and from these godforsaken places, apparently unsure at every turn whether he's on the right track, and even if he is, where it will lead and what difference it will make. Perpetual motion is the only palliative for the self-doubt that eats away at him: "Ogden felt like a phony, a fraud. Who was he to be playing investigator?" IF Ogden knew his Shakespeare, he could say, with Hamlet: "The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!" For the attentive reader gradually begins to discern something deeper in all this. There are clues along the way, but the ending will still come as a surprise, and it packs a punch not soon forgotten. Everett casts his line, as it were, pretty far, and some of the things he reels in, along with a few red herrings, are weighty indeed: racism, anomie, disillusionment, the meaning (or lack thereof) of one man's life - the American nightmare, in brief, at the end of the line. The settings, the protagonist and the eccentric and pathetic cast of characters will haunt you long after you close the book. I haven't read anything like it since Georges Simenon. And, as in Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels, the prevailing mood is one of existential despair. "He looked around the room again," Everett writes, "scanning, looking for anything that seemed out of place. He realized that everything was out of place." Except the trout in the river, awaiting the lure. Everett's protagonist is no radical, but he's more of a misfit than most, even in a place full of them. Roger Boylan is the author of the novels "Killoyle" and "The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad."
Library Journal Review
With Ogden Walker, the African American deputy of a small New Mexico town, tracking the killer of an old woman and finding much more. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.