Overview
When the daughter of a black federal judge gets carried away with her militant environmentalism, Denver bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter CJ Floyd is hired to retrieve her and the important documents she possesses. But when CJ finds her, she's been strangled with the devil's hatband—a length of barbed wire—the symbol of the cattle industry she wants to destroy. The body count mounts as CJ's search for the murderer makes him a target for environmentalist crazies, gangbangers, police, and even a deadly, genetically engineered virus. This is a first novel, and the first in a series, and it's a worthy debut.
When a well-connected judge asks small-time bail bondsman CJ Floyd to look for his missing daughter, CJ thinks he's hit the big time. CJ quickly tracks her to Steamboat Springs, Colorado and the environmental group the girl is involved with, Planet First. But he soon discovers that the radical group will do anything to achieve its goals--and that this career-making case could be his last. Targeted ads. National media. HC: Mysterious Press.
Synopsis
When the daughter of a black federal judge gets carried away with her militant environmentalism, Denver bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter CJ Floyd is hired to retrieve her and the important documents she possesses. But when CJ finds her, she's been strangled with the devil's hatband—a length of barbed wire—the symbol of the cattle industry she wants to destroy. The body count mounts as CJ's search for the murderer makes him a target for environmentalist crazies, gangbangers, police, and even a deadly, genetically engineered virus. This is a first novel, and the first in a series, and it's a worthy debut.
Publishers Weekly
Crimes against cattle and cars feature strongly in this muddled but undeniably original debut starring CJ Floyd, a black Denver bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter. Hired by a couple of corporate troubleshooters, CJ searches for the missing daughter of a black federal judge, figuring that his clients are less interested in Brenda Mathison than in some documents they say she stole. Brenda is a leader of PlanetFirst, a gang of animal rights fanatics who've been tormenting some ranchers. The group's ranks also include two hard cases who share Brenda's bed at various times, and who have in their possession a new killer virus that could effectively wipe out the cattle population. By the time CJ arrives at Brenda's rural cabin, she's dead on the floor, wearing a barbed-wire necklace. CJ's subsequent investigation is as much a ritual of revenge as it is a battle for controlling rights to the virus. Greer packs in a few too many subplots (a slow romance with a woman at a diner; a feud with a Denver gangster), and he reiterates too often what we already know: that a black man like CJ knows justice isn't blind. But his narrative is taut and the characters-the tough CJ and others-are intriguing. Though Greer could easily have jettisoned a hundred pages and still retain a slick-functioning mystery, his first work, for all its excesses, leaves a reader hungry for more. Author tour. (Mar.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Crimes against cattle and cars feature strongly in this muddled but undeniably original debut starring CJ Floyd, a black Denver bail bondsman and sometime bounty hunter. Hired by a couple of corporate troubleshooters, CJ searches for the missing daughter of a black federal judge, figuring that his clients are less interested in Brenda Mathison than in some documents they say she stole. Brenda is a leader of PlanetFirst, a gang of animal rights fanatics who've been tormenting some ranchers. The group's ranks also include two hard cases who share Brenda's bed at various times, and who have in their possession a new killer virus that could effectively wipe out the cattle population. By the time CJ arrives at Brenda's rural cabin, she's dead on the floor, wearing a barbed-wire necklace. CJ's subsequent investigation is as much a ritual of revenge as it is a battle for controlling rights to the virus. Greer packs in a few too many subplots (a slow romance with a woman at a diner; a feud with a Denver gangster), and he reiterates too often what we already know: that a black man like CJ knows justice isn't blind. But his narrative is taut and the characters-the tough CJ and others-are intriguing. Though Greer could easily have jettisoned a hundred pages and still retain a slick-functioning mystery, his first work, for all its excesses, leaves a reader hungry for more. Author tour. (Mar.)Kirkus Reviews
As the lowest-ranking member of Denver's Bail Bondsman's Row, CF Floyd doesn't see much big money. But he's offered a serious bonus for retrieving Brenda Mathison and the unspecified document she's run off with from her eco-terrorist buddies of the Grand River Tribe—and the pot only gets bigger when he finds her dead, and her father, a federal judge, hires him to track down her killer. The most likely suspect is Grand River guru Dennis Deere, who plans to bring the region's cattle industry to its knees with a villainous toxin likely to be as fatal to cattle hands as to their four-legged charges. But CF also has to watch out for local gang leader Raymond Hicks, a.k.a. Razor D, whom he figures has trashed CF's prize '57 Bel Air and would like to do the same to its owner—especially after he sees that a witness to the vandalism won't have to wait around to die of some cattle toxin. Though his supporting cast is big without being distinctive—you may have lost track of the killer by the time he's unmasked—first-novelist Greer shows a piercing awareness of the countless kinds of racism that keep CF permanently behind the eight ball.Walter Mosley Lite, then, with big-sky action substituting for Mosley's sense of creeping urban nightmare.