Strike Dog: A Woods Cop Mystery

The entire 6 volume "Woods Cop Mysteries" are excellent reading. Joseph Heywood is a gifted author, with an imagination second to none. The man is a genius at weaving a story. Strike Dog (the 5th book in this series), is just excellent. I can't wait for the seventh book to be published.

Full disclosure: I went to college with Heywood. Good guy. From time to time, there are books which set up a world so authentic that you find yourself in that world. The best was Dorothy Dunnet, but there are others. Heywood pulls the reader into his world, the world of the woods cop. He gets the rhythms of the UP right. He makes walking through the woods, for some either unpleasant or boring, vastly interesting, even if it were not the role of the woods cop to see things. For soldiers, he takes you back to the time when being in the woods at night was normal and made you feel you were the hunter. His premise, that a serial murderer was killing one Conservation Officer in each state over a period of decades, is, of course, unlikely. But as Heywood lays it out, that's only because, states being states, the information is not shared. After all, COs get killed from time to time, anyway. Finding a pattern is a different matter. And then you think it's not that unlikely. That it hasn't happened, we think, doesn't mean it won't. And Heywood makes it plausible. The cop's woodscraft and cop skills are awesome, and you get the idea that Heywood, if he were to lose a hundred pounds, would be as good as his hero. He knows this stuff. He knows. He works with conservation officers for fun, hunts, fishes, camps, hikes. That's why he's so good. Being a service brat--Air Force--Heywood is big on what might be referred to as "the brotherhood of the harness" (I think Stephen Crane used that phrase) and when things go sour, the woods cop can count on his brethren, including COs from other states. That includes a real character from Missouri, where Grady Service makes some investigative progress and discovers the clannishness of the backwoods. As an ex-Infantryman, I might be induced by Heywood's writing to walk in the deep woods even without anybody paying me to do it. Highly, unreservedly recommended.

I started Strike Dog with trepidation, fearing that anything with "A woods cop mystery" on the cover would be way too suffocatingly enclosed and even terminally folksy. Heywood is excellent, easily the equal of Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, or Robert Parker. Grady Service, the "woods cop," is a universal character, by no means a type - he may cruise the Michigan Upper Pensinula in a truck, but he's as smart and real as Elvis Cole, Spenser, or Harry Bosch. Those authors are the standard for measuring any mystery writer's style, and Heywood's writing is pure pleasure - clean, sincere and unaffected. He knows how to keep a story moving, and the energy stays high. Let's hope he'll never fall into the trap that has caught so many authors of mysteries in rural scenes: falling in love with the minutiae of his characters' lives to the extent that they become unbearably dull. Heywood even makes the fishing details interesting, even beautiful. I'd drive 75 miles through the U.P. in winter to shake his hand.

This author deserves a wider audience. He takes the reader places not seen by most. The ending here is a little bit of a let down, but the trip there is a trip. Heavily plotted, well populated by good characters, and well written, these books could be on the best seller lists. A serial killer stalks our game officer hero, who uses skills and friendships to solve the puzzle.