Black Hammock

December 7, 2015
As Wiley explains in an author's note to his unconventional second Daniel Turner noir (after 2014's Blue Avenue), the Florida homicide detective always plays a supporting character, "the common element in others' lives and deaths, getting caught in the spirals of crime that he investigates." This time, the main players are Daniel's sister, Lillian, an English teacher, and her husband, Johnny Bellefleur, a skiptracer permanently scarred by his memories of his time dealing with dead bodies as an Army corpsman. Lillian takes a special interest in one of her students, 19-year-old Sheneel Greene, and is devastated when the young woman's partially decomposed body is found near a clay pit. Sheneel, who had a history of suicide attempts, is believed to have taken her own life. Johnny finds proof of foul play when he comes across Sheneel's arm, cleanly severed from the rest of her body. Wiley tosses several surprises in along the way to the tense conclusion. The book's strength lies in its insights into the well-developed characters, enhanced by alternating first-person narratives. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.

June 1, 2016

Det. Daniel Turner investigates an unsolved 18-year-old homicide in this third outing (after Second Skin). Oren Jakobsen was eight when his father was killed and he was left for dead. Now, Oren has returned to Florida for revenge against his mother. This atmospheric Southern gothic uncovers unpleasant secrets for all involved.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2016
Poor Daniel Turner. He is the nominal hero of Wiley's gritty noir series set in and around Jacksonville, Florida, but he doesn't get a whole lot of screen time. Here the Jacksonville homicide detective's main job is to help set the premise: haunted by an unsolved disappearance years ago, he returns to the scene after hearing about a disturbance in the area. The focus then turns to the bad guys and the morbid, even slightly fantastical, revenge drama they are intent on playing out. Oren is a man out to destroy the man who murdered his father and married his mother. Yes, it's Hamlet in the country, but Oren is no prince. He leads a small squad of wannabe killers on a road trip from Georgia to Oren's family home, Black Hammock Island, in northern Florida. Once there, they encircle the house and begin a siege of torture and torment that evokes Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. The horrific action sometimes strains credibility, but no one will stop reading, so hypnotic is Wiley's writing. Perhaps the point here is the corrosiveness of revengeor the ability of a fine writer to make so outlandish a narrative so powerful.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2016
Something completely different--meaning surprisingly familiar--from Southern noir specialist Wiley: a revenge tragedy with strong intimations of the Oresteia. Body-parts procurement specialist Oren, whom an earlier generation would have called a resurrectionist, has come to North Florida's Black Hammock Island looking for revenge. Though he's left his actress girlfriend, Carol, behind in a local hotel, he's not alone; his gigantic friend Paul is with him, along with Paul's three fearsome dogs and two human helpers, Jimmy and Robert. For nearly a generation, Oren's been driven by a thirst to avenge his father, tormented Vietnam veteran Amon, who, Kay Jakobson told Detective Daniel Turner (Second Skin, 2015, etc.), disappeared one day without a trace. Turner's never bought that story, and now it seems about to blow up in Kay's face. But not right away. Pretending he's a fan who wants to know more about the jangled self-portraits that have made Kay's reputation, Oren worms his way into the house she shares with Walter, her violence-prone lover, and her children, Lexi and Cristofer, who barely knew their brother as infants. Bad things begin to happen. Kay wakes up to find all her chickens dead; a fire destroys her studio and the paintings inside; her neighbor, ancient civil rights activist Lane Charles, strikes an alliance with the interlopers. Oren tells everyone but his sister, who shares the narration with him in alternate chapters, that he doesn't have anything to do with the intruders; the time it takes her and Walter to seriously question his bland assurances is only the most obvious sign of the ritualistic quality of the tale. Neither as scary nor as suspenseful as most of Wiley's Florida gothics but harrowing in its own peculiar way, even if it poses no threat to its Aeschylean model.

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April 4, 2016
Oren, the protagonist of Wiley’s uneven third Daniel Turner thriller (after 2015’s Second Skin), was left for dead as an eight-year-old when his mother and her lover, Walter, murdered his father, Amon, at his family’s house on Florida’s Black Hammock Island. A family friend rescued Oren and took him to Atlanta, where he grew up in safety. Eighteen years later, Oren drives from Atlanta to Florida with his girlfriend and three male companions to set in motion an elaborate plan for revenge. Meanwhile, homicide detective Turner, who knows only that Amon disappeared years ago, pursues what he suspects is a murder case. Wiley has a gift for short neo-gothic sentence fragments (“A slow kill. An orchestrated kill. A slow-motion war of obliteration”), but crisp prose makes up only in part for characters who often act unrealistically (Oren has ample time to narrate his life story to his now-grown sister, Lexi, in the attic of Walter’s house on the island while his friends assault its occupants below). Amon’s compelling backstory is a plus. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.