Though a version of this review was first published in Cemetery Dance, it seems relevant now that the novel has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award.

What an utter delight is this humorously titled satirical mystery by the elusive Jay Russell! (He wrote Burning Bright and Greed & Stuff, as well as the Marty Burns mysteries, but I was unable to dig up his true identity — though I suspect in his formative years he may have been just like me.) If David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino had teamed up to script the Shaun Cassidy Hardy Boys series, only then can one get the full sense of what Russell has wrought here. The publisher's own copy mentions the Lynch comparison, but they also call it "a post-modern pastiche" and "at once a parody and a tribute." Usually one would be better off avoiding a novel hyped this way, but not this time. Horror? No, but read on anyway.

From the moment the first person protagonist drives his vintage AMC Pacer into his Midwestern hometown, which has been renamed Ideaville in an attempt to remake it into a gaming industry Silicon Valley, it's a strange blend of computer hacking, film noir, nostalgia, mystery, and melodrama. Estranged son of the now disgraced police chief, he was once the smarty pants know-it-all Boy Detective (whose real nickname is that of a reference book) who cracked "cases" to wide appeal and great publicity, though his fumbling attempts at morality drove Sandy, the love of his life, right into the arms of his Lex Luthor, the evil part-time football player and full-time bully Roach Blackwell. Now Sandy is dead, and our hero has come home for the funeral—and to face his demons. His father, for one, and the scandal that ousted him from prominence and turned him into a joke in the town now run by Roach and his software firm.

But Ideaville is caught in the middle of a software war between Blackwell and two rival firms, and violence is in the air. The Boy Detective, now grown-up and world weary, finds a strong reason to stir the pot. And before long the pot stirs back. Roach Blackwell has always held a grudge against him, even though he ended up with a severely damaged Sandy and many more pieces of the Boy's world—and his Microsoft-type company is about to make a big breakthrough that will kill the competition. One competing firm is headed by a man in a yellow hat and his perverted (but curious!) monkey, while the other is run by two shotgun-toting crazies Francisco and Jose, Los Bros Robusto ("the hardy ones"). And there's plenty of bad blood—not to mention blood and guts—to go around.

Funny, satirical, and nostalgic, the novel is at once surreal, hyperreal, and unreal. Russell runs a riff on the Dashiell Hammett classic here, along the way naming, name-dropping, or alluding to just about everyone you can think of in noir and children's detective literature, plus the occasional movie—Raymond Chandler, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and their authors and the Stratemeyer Syndicate, Charles Spain Verral, George Wyatt, S.E. Hinton, Roahl Dahl, The Continental Op, Farewell My Lovely, The Big Sleep, Miller's Crossing, and too many more to mention. The gimmick works, if you pick up on most of these references, though it might alienate folks who didn't grow up reading mysteries and having their idea of morality shaped by them. It worked for me, because much of the above made up my reading list, too. But Russell also has a lot to say about facing one's past (and past mistakes) and redemption: "Why not remember the bad, as long as you don't wallow in it?"

Don't let the over-the-top gimmick stop you from enjoying one of those books that surprises and entertains on almost every page.