Bernard Schopen

Real Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Desert stillness meets the cacophony of Las Vegas.

Norman “Fats” Rangle, an ex–deputy sheriff, operates a horse stabling and excursion business with his brother and sister-in-law on their family ranch in the small rural community of Blue Lake, a few hours outside of Las Vegas. By chance, high on a southern Nevada mountain range, Fats discovers the wreckage of a plane that crashed two years earlier. Although he reports his find to the show more sheriff, he does not disclose that someone had already been to the crash site—evidence that Fats deliberately destroyed.

Soon, Fats is tracking back and forth between Las Vegas and Blue Lake in a search for a missing cousin, a briefcase full of cash, and, finally, for a killer. Along the way, Fats also begins to understand that he’s searching for himself and his place in a rapidly changing West.

Angry and alienated, Fats distrusts everyone he meets, from sleaze-merchants and political power brokers to two women: one he wants to believe in, a retired judge; and the other, a police sergeant, he can’t quite believe isn’t deceiving him. After all, in this Nevada, corruption is a given. Everybody lies. Much is uncertain—motives, loyalties, affections. But in Drowning in the Desert, one thing is certain: water is a precious resource that can both kill and be killed for.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One thing I think people in the rest of the developed world do not "get" about the western US is the absolute centrality of water to all local politics. At no time is the subject of the water supply, water rights, and the technology of water treatment far from the center of local talk.

I enjoyed this noir novel as much for its setting as for its story because Author Schopen gets this in his native-westerner bones. Born in Deadwood, South Dakota—how could he not? I also appreciated the fact that his sleuth is an angry, bitter man because he's been turfed out of the job of Sheriff he sought by someone more physically attractive. His record was good...the other guy would not be called "Fats" as a nickname so he was ghosted out of the job.

After Fats' cousin and ranch hand vanishes after saying he was going into Vegas to see a girl, Fats needs to find out what happened and get him back...if he can. Investigating comes naturally to Fats after twenty years in law enforcement so off he follows the trail, reluctantly it must be said as he'd rather just live his life. What he discovers is surprising. A crashed small plane near Blue Lake, which seems odd because in his job he should've known about it even though it wasn't in his former jurisdiction. Reporting his discovery to the new, attractive sheriff gets him nowhere.

Except in the sights of the people who lost the plane. It had illicit cargo that they badly want back. And in following his cousin to Vegas, Fats discovers he was boasting of having a lot of money. The penny drops...now the disappearance, the sudden interest in him from people he'd never dealt with before, and the local water wars the current sheriff isn't working to resolve all make sense.

It's fun for me to revisit the West in a realistic way. I found the necessary exaggerations that make novels fiction relatively mild in this story. If you expect noir to be gory, there's no need to fuss, this is a very unviolent example of the genre. We're following Fats as he pieces together the trail his cousin blazed then the skulduggery the politicos are up to in order to profit from Las Vegas' insatiable need for water.

Resolutions in noir fiction get to be morally ambiguous. It is part of their charm. I enjoyed this story across multiple axes. I'm going to recommend it for Yuletide escape reading because nothing needs more escape from than Togetherness and Fats' ambiguity about rescuing his cousin reinforces the fact that family is complicated. Sometimes maddening. But in the end, no matter how much your inner Schweinhund urges you to stay on the sofa, you're rewarded for doing the right thing...even if only internally.

Satisfying puzzle, terrific setting got right for once. show less

Nevada noir aptly describes this mystery set vividly in the desert outside Las Vegas. The hard-boiled detective is, in fact, an ex-sheriff’s deputy turned cowboy, “Fats” Rangle, and political corruption oozes out of Las Vegas to taint even the small rural community of Blue Lake in Pinenut County. The plot is tautly paced and involves an old plane crash, a missing briefcase full of money and maybe some secrets even more worth killing for, and dead bodies galore. There are strippers, show more muscle-bound henchmen, salt-of-the-earth ranchers, shadowy corporations hiding behind holding companies, corporate “fixers,” politicians with an interest in water rights, a sleazy P.I., possibly corruptible city cops, and a love interest for our hard-boiled investigator—but can she be trusted? Plus, there are horses, mountain lions, dusty dirt roads with the scent of sage and piñon. In short, the novel is jam-packed with all the elements that make a good noir, all drenched in the hot desert atmosphere of Nevada. It kept me turning pages, gave enough clues that I could pat myself on the back for figuring some things out ahead of time, but kept some secrets right until the end. Fats has some serious anger management issues, and I didn’t think I’d care for him much at all, but by the end I was rooting for him, and even glad that there seems to be the possibility of a sequel or two. show less

Really well crafted pseudo-noir - it's set in Vegas and the Nevada desert, so it's never going to feel like 60's Paris of traditional noir, but it has the same feel, languid descriptions dark undertones and a little blurring of the moral lines.

Fats Radler is more or less enjoying life, having taken early retirement from the town police he's living with his brother and sister-in-law on a ranch part of a small town a couple of hours away from Vegas. A trip up-country reveals a small plane show more that's been missing for a couple of years, along with some footprints to indicate it's already been found and not reported. He escapes the media circus to head to Vegas where it's last heard his cousin had been spending more money than it seems likely he'd come by honestly.

There's dangerous women, dodgy sheriff's, gangsters, hoodlums and politicians and everything else you'd want from a noir detective - even Fats has his own dark past. Occasionally the descriptions get carried away and there's perhaps a little too much complexity to the plot, but it is all made clear and wrapped up It doesn't feel like the start of a series, but there is perhaps room for more stories in the setting.

Really quite enjoyed this. show less

I received this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.

An easy to read and intriguing story, about a whole lot of things, but mainly political corruption and one man’s struggle to keep his head above financial woes and the mire of society.

Fats Radler is, as we hear so many times, an “ex”-Deputy. There is a residual bitterness that he did not get the sheriff’s job, but has tried to move on with his life.

A nephew, who is also a coworker, goes missing, which is unusual, show more and then Fats finds a missing crashed light aircraft which was rumoured to have a significant amount of political money onboard. There’s no sign of the briefcase containing the money when Fats inspects the plane, but clearly, he is not the first person to have been there. He puts two and two together.

From there the story becomes more complex. There are local and state politics at play, the underbelly of Las Vegas (let’s be honest here: Vegas is a weird town before you scratch the surface and get involved with organised crime), missing persons, dodgy women, hired thugs, a woman slowly losing her mind, and hard-working ranchers just trying to get along.

It wouldn’t be a thriller/noir story without an unexpected twist or two, and the reader will find them here.

A couple of things bothered me, as a non-Nevadan and non-American. At one point, there’s a violent fist-fight at a funeral, and yet everyone in attendance seems to be quite calm about this. I know this is American, and partly set in Las Vegas, but wouldn’t gunshots in a domestic suburb raise alarm in the community? Wouldn’t first responders be called? show less