Terry Saltz is a carpenter who is out of work and fresh out of jail as this book begins. He got drunk and into a bar fight, ended up in jail, and as a result lost his job, his wife, and his brand-new truck. It was the truck that hurt most.
Terry straightens himself out, stops drinking, gets a job delivering pizza, and finds a community of real friends. When one of the other drivers at the pizza place is murdered, Terry and his friends take it on themselves to find the murderer.
Mystery booksellers created a new classification for this book: the trailer park mystery. But don’t expect satire: the book is, if anything, too reverential in its treatment of characters who work hard for a living and don’t always get along too well with the cops. Its subtitle is “A Working Man’s Mystery.”
Everyone around Terry Saltz has a nickname. Terry wants to be called Muzzy, a local word for a bad boy, druggie type. Someone calls him that as a joke, and Terry likes it. But the nickname won’t stick; no one will use it. Terry, finally, isn’t the bad boy type. The book was originally titled Muzzy and its publishing history shows some things about the way mysteries get into the bookstores these days. Margo Pierce Dorksen, the author—L. T. Fawkes is her pen name—apparently could not find a traditional publisher for her first mystery. So it appeared through iPublish.com, a brief experiment Time Warner tried in 2001. iPublish.com offered electronic book downloads and on-demand print copies of its titles, and it disappeared before the end of 2001, but by that time Muzzy had already received the most votes in an on-line contest for the most popular iPublish.com title. Meanwhile, Dorksen had another Terry Saltz book either finished or almost ready, and Signet republished her first book as a paperback, retitled it Cold Slice, and promised that there were more Terry Saltz mysteries on the way. No one except an established author can now sell single mysteries to publishers; prospective authors must approach publishers with two finished and more planned.
Cold Slice has a lot of detail about the running of a pizza parlor, the way orders are taken and distributed among drivers, the peak in business on nights when it rains, and so on. There is also a fair amount of detail about carpentry, because Terry gets back into his real work as the book progresses. It’s not a fast-moving or an especially unguessable plot, but it takes its time creating characters and showing their growing bonds. I think you might like it, and if you do, there are now two more Terry Saltz mysteries, called Lights Out and Early Eight. ( )