Imperial Valley: A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco

Shaw’s lively third mystery featuring Jimmy Veeder (after 2014’s Plaster City) finds the former wild man into hardscrabble farming and family in southernmost California. Jimmy and his new wife, Angie, a nurse, along with their eight-year-old adopted son, Juan, embark on a honeymoon to Mazatlan, Mexico, that’s also a trip paid for by his long-time gangster friend, Tomás Morales, to find Juan’s grandfather. Along the way, they fall into a violent tangle of cartel drug smuggling. Among the slam-bang fisticuffs, frequent references to Shaw’s favorite “songs for fightin’,” and often funny reflections on male-female role reversals, Shaw lands a few good punches on the plight of decent ordinary folk at the hands of the powerful and corrupt on both sides of the border; he also suggests that the problem in defeating the cartels is that they feed the poor, while the government only takes anything it can from them. Shaw celebrates the spirit he finds in small towns, where friends are family, as he brings this amusing riff on The Magnificent Seven to a riotous shoot-’em-up climax. (Mar.)