Off the Bookshelf

Midnight Hour

Silver Dagger, 188 pp., $15 (paper)

Kinky Friedman gives good blurb. "Great voice," he wrote when describing Mary Saums' Midnight Hour. "One of the best first novels I've read since Hank went to Jesus." While the quip gets you to pick it up in the first place, Saums' story, clean writing, and Willi, her strong female lead, get you to stay. While Midnight Hour falls into some first-novel pitfalls, like underdeveloped secondary characters and a breezy attention to detail, Saums has crafted a whodunit that whisks you into Willi's world and never stops until the killer is found. Willi is a successful Nashville country & western session singer facing the wrong side of 35. She's starting to get fed up with the catty politics of the music biz and the constant ass-kissing that her career requires. Soon, however, a dashing private investigator falls into her life and provides enough distraction to make her forget her angst -- until he is killed and she finds herself smack in the middle of his case, both literally and figuratively. While the amateur-investigator-in-spite-of-herself idea is older than Sherlock, Saums displays the candor of an insider and has a lock on the Nashville scene. Plus, Willi herself is just dang likable, despite her quick temper and sometimes faulty perceptions, which guarantees that there will be more books with her as the brash star.