Bad moon rising

Review by Booklist Review

This third Bad Axe County novel starring Heidi Kick, sheriff of a tiny Wisconsin county, gets off to an unconventional start: the sheriff squatting on her lawn and urinating into a jar. The discovery of a body in a ditch gets the plot going (the victim appears to have been buried alive), and further murders follow, all during an oppressive heat wave. Heidi's investigation is slowed by the lack of help she receives from police and fire commissioners: she's busted them all for drunk driving. Further problems: Heidi's mother-in-law acts up. Her son is in trouble. A difficult reelection campaign looms. She may be pregnant--that's the point of the jar business. Heidi is resourceful, but she needs help this time and gets it from sacked newspaper editor Leroy Fanta, who finds a link to a local eccentric. Together, the pair push through a world of death and decay, pessimism and depression. An oddly compelling country noir in which a few good souls attempt to fight entropy.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In Galligan's suspenseful third novel set in Wisconsin's Bad Axe County (after 2020's Dead Man Dancing), Sheriff Heidi Kick, who's running for reelection against Barry Rickreiner, receives an anonymous email from "Oppo" offering her opposition research on her rival. The death years before of Rickreiner's then girlfriend, Kim Maybee, who ingested buttermilk laced with pesticide, was ruled a suicide, but was in fact a homicide, according to Oppo. At the time, Rickreiner was an alcoholic and addict, and his recovery and redemption story is key to his unremittingly negative campaign. Meanwhile, Kick has to investigate the death of a homeless man who was buried alive. That murder may be linked to a string of disappearances of homeless men, which a priest unsuccessfully tried to get law enforcement interested in. Kick's efforts are aided by the local newspaper editor, a political supporter who's been threatened by an apparent crank. Readers will root for Kick as the action builds to a satisfyingly hard-edged denouement. Fans of gritty rural crime, such as Ace Atkins's Quinn Colson series, will be enthralled. Agent: Joanna MacKenzie, Nelson Literary. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

"Kick her out." "Barry her." Heidi Kick, sheriff of Bad Axe County, WI, sees Barry Rickreiner's campaign signs for sheriff all over the county, even stuck in her yard. Her seven-year-old twin sons see them, too, and one is acting out. That's the least of her problems. Heidi suspects she might be pregnant. She doesn't trust the man appointed interim deputy sheriff. There's a heat wave with temperatures over 100 degrees, and she's sending her deputies for welfare checks. A priest is harping about homeless men who disappeared and were killed. Sheriff Kick's discovery of an Amish-appearing man dying in an outhouse on booby-trapped property escalates all the trouble. Then the former editor of the local newspaper disappears after corresponding with a radical environmentalist. Sheriff Kick and her understaffed team have more problems than any small force should have to handle. VERDICT The third "Bad Axe County" mystery, following Dead Man Dancing, is a grim, atmospheric story set in a bleak territory. Fans of Tricia Fields's gritty Josie Gray mysteries or Chris Harding Thornton's dark Pickard County Atlas may appreciate the bizarre cast of characters and the harsh setting of this book.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Rural Wisconsin is darker than you might think in the third gripping mystery featuring a young woman sheriff. Sheriff Heidi Kick has seen murder victims before. Even in Wisconsin's Bad Axe County (or maybe especially there), people kill each other. But she's never before seen one who looks like he crawled back out of the grave. Besides a coat of dirt, this dead man has two gunshot wounds, one boot, one bare foot, and no name. That's also rare, since the sheriff knows almost everyone in her sparsely populated jurisdiction. As Heidi tries to find out who the man is and how he ended up dead in a ditch, Leroy "Grape" Fanta begins to suspect the stranger's death might be connected to a string of unhinged letters and calls he's received from someone who signs himself "FROM HELL HOLLOW." Leroy, a Vietnam vet, has served as the dedicated editor-in-chief of the town's newspaper for 43 years. But no more--he's been fired, and the paper's been turned into a shopper. Leroy and Heidi are friends who share a nemesis: Babette Rickreiner, a rich widow with a mean mouth and a dictator's personality. She bought Leroy's paper, and her spoiled, vicious son, Barry, is running against Heidi in the sheriff's election with all the cheap tricks he can muster. Heidi tries to ignore them and do her job. From the site where the murder victim was found, she follows a trail of empty beer cans to a remote farm where she finds a young woman, dressed in the plain clothing of the Amish, passed out drunk and an older man nearly dead in the outhouse. Things accelerate from there for both Heidi and Leroy. Heidi has worries at home, too. She and her good-guy husband, Harley, have three kids, and Taylor, one of their twin sons, is acting out in unusual and worrying ways. And Heidi just might be pregnant again. This is the third book in Galligan's series about Heidi, who has become a solidly engaging character amid a small-town swarm of strange folks. The plot is gritty and propulsive, the prose well crafted, the finale satisfyingly bizarre. Intriguing characters take a wild ride through backwoods Wisconsin in this irresistible mystery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 Cut several fresh (bright green) dandelion leaves and put them in a clean glass or plastic container. Do not use a metal container. Make sure that the leaves, once cut, do not come in contact with sunlight. Urinate on the leaves until they are completely submerged. After 10 minutes, check for red bumps on the leaves. They say that we hear music in the womb. We hear voices. We are designed this way. The wet tympanic membranes, the yielding ossicles, the soft hard-wiring to the brain, these are created to convey to the womb the sweet vibrations of enveloping love. And so, swaddled in supportive sound, we grow. What could go wrong? Bad Axe County Sheriff Heidi Kick rolled and gasped beneath her sticky sheets. What could go wrong? Seriously? She lurched up, still three-quarters asleep. Moonlight glistened on her forehead. Night sounds grated at the screen. It was all too obvious what could go wrong. We could hear all the wrong things. Anger. Stupidity. The subtracting silence of despair. The pitiless gnashing of time, the thunderous indifference of nature. Surely, along with Mozart and Mommy, we also hear the insanity of the whip-poor-will, the ghoulish wailing of coyotes, the death scream when the owl hits the rabbit. Or gunshots. Yes, she had heard a gunshot. Because now she heard another. From where? Inside herself? Outside? Two hard cracks echoed across the landscape mapped inside her sheriff's brain, four hundred square miles of farm and forest, ridge and coulee. Somewhere. Anywhere. She fell back upon the bed. As her dream resumed, the gunshots echoed. Womb became dirt became a tomb. The Bad Axe soil she had tried to cultivate--her de-thistled pasture, her expanding vegetable and flower gardens, her new acres of alfalfa--poured over her like rain. Hot. Dry. Black. Rain. Heavy. Sheriff Kick groaned and lurched up again, desperate to fully awaken. She wrested over her head and flung away her sweaty T-shirt: BARN HAIR, DON'T CARE. Red-blond strands stuck across her mouth as she pitched onto her side and groped emptily for Harley. Help me! But her husband the baseball hero was a hundred miles away representing the Bad Axe Rattlers at a Midwest League all-star event. He had won the home-run derby last night. Today was the game. Opie, help me! But her oldest child, the family's wise one, was away at summer camp. Ten-double-zero! Ten-double-zero! Officer down! All units respond! The sheriff could not wake up. Shovel by shovel, the dirt massed upon her. She arched under the weight. She clenched her sheets, drove her hip bones up. Her mouth gaped. "Unngh!" She contracted every muscle, exploded upward. Contracted and exploded, sucked air, spit dirt, kicked, clawed. At last she breached. Gasped for air. Cried in jerks and gulps like a baby. Caught her breath. Turned on the little rawhide lamp beside her bed. There it was. Before sleep, she had found her diary from high school, the summer she had turned sixteen, and she had found the page where she had written down the recipe. Cut several fresh (bright green) dandelion leaves and put them in a clean glass or plastic container... "No," she whispered, touching the clasp on the diary. "I can't be. I'm careful. And we hardly ever even..." But she was seventeen days late. The recipe for lassies , her Grandma Heinz had advised her, who don't dare go to the drugstore or the doctor. At dawn she endured a stinging bladder as she searched the pantry for an empty Mason jar. When she found one, a pint that once contained strawberry-rhubarb jam, she dropped her cell phone into her robe pocket and hurried outside. As she started barefoot across the dew-drenched yard, the nightmare clung to her. She tasted dirt. Her body felt sore all over. Her gut retained a sickish tickle of dread. And the dream's special effects seemed to have warped her waking world. The normally clean breath of dawn smelled like kerosene and fish. Birdsong jangled and the sunrise hissed, dissolving shadows with a crackle. She recalled how seven years ago when she carried her twin boys, vanilla ice cream had tasted like socks. I can't be. Please just let me be sick. Overnight, two familiar signs--KICK HER OUT and BARRY HER--had appeared on her yard. The election was still three months away, but Barry Rickreiner had been trolling her and spreading rumors since around the Fourth of July. She wondered now, who was Oppo? What did Oppo mean: Kim Maybee's suicide was a homicide? Should she fight back with counter-rumors? Maybe. But as much as she loathed Rickreiner, this didn't feel right. Her strategy had been to start campaigning on the first of September, at which time she meant to take the high road. Meanwhile, the heat wave had claimed all her attention. Hurry, Heidi, before you piss down your leg. She hastened around the corner of the old farmhouse. So as not to cast a shadow, she sneaked beneath the curtained window of the guest room, where the kids' Grammy Belle Kick slept whenever Harley was gone overnight. Belle had seemed hostile lately, suspicious, as if believing some new gossip. The sheriff ducked under her clothesline, gave wide berth to the soggy septic drain field, and arrived upon the shady ground beneath the honeysuckle thicket. Cut several fresh dandelion leaves... Several meant how many? She preferred exact numbers. She packed nine bright-green leaves, serrated, oozing latex, into the jar. She was ready to cut her bladder loose when she felt the buzz of her phone. "Sorry, Denise," she blurted into it. "Family stuff. I gotta call you right back." Her dispatcher and friend Denise Halverson said, "I think we need you now, Heidi." "I can't--" She couldn't even finish the sentence. She dropped to a squat, tossed her phone upon the wet lawn, reached beneath her robe, and aimed the jar against herself. Wow. Better. "OK, go ahead." Denise spoke distantly from the grass. "Do you remember that priest from La Crosse who told us homeless men are being picked off the street and never coming back? He was calling the counties a few weeks ago to put us on alert?" She remembered appreciating the passionate good intentions of the call, but it had left her with questions. The priest had said that five men had disappeared--under suspicious circumstances, he was certain--from the streets of the nearest "big" city. But wasn't the simplest explanation that transients tended to be transient? And why was he so convinced that there was foul play involved? "Yes, I remember. He thinks someone's offering them farm work. Denise, what happened?" "A milk truck driver scared some turkey vultures off a body in the ditch on Liberty Hill Road. Deputy Luck just got there. It looks like a homicide. It looks like the victim might have been homeless." The jar grew warm and heavy in her hand. She heard the gunshot echoes from her dream. "Sheriff? Are you there?" "Let me guess," she said. "Shot twice with a small-bore rifle, probably a .22." The phone went silent for moment. "And the body's caked in dirt." "What's going on, Heidi?" "Am I right?" "Heidi, what the hell is going on?" She pulled the jar away and finished into the grass. She raised her face toward the house and saw Grammy Belle staring back at her. The guest room curtain fell closed. She dumped the jar. "I'm on my way," she said. Excerpted from Bad Moon Rising: A Bad Axe County Novel by John Galligan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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