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Wolverine Bros. Freight & Storage: A Conway Sax Mystery (2014)

by Steve Ulfelder(Favorite Author)

4.17 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1250028108 (ISBN13: 9781250028105)

languge

English

genre

Middle Grade & Children's

publisher

Minotaur Books

review 1: The Conway Sax novels are picture perfect taut mysteries with nothing wasted. Sax is a tough ex race car driver, who is not afraid to get his hands dirty or to go against the criminal element to help friends. Sax is a member of the Barnstormers, a group of AA extremists who helped Sax over a rough patch. Eudora Spoon, his sponsor, has asked Sax to rescue her youngest son, Kenny Spoon, her drug addict ex actor son who has been kidnapped by a California gang. Sax rescues Kenny, with some skillful driving and brute force and brings him home to Eudora, where he is re-united with his mother and half brother, a former college football star, turned cop in the local department. But before Sax can even find out why Kenny was kidnapped, Sax witnesses a brutal murder on Spoon lan... mored. Sax chases the killers from the scene and realizes that the California gang provided the killer. Sax vows vengeance, but first has to figure out why Kenny was kidnapped and why is a California gang involved back east. Its a tangled tale of money and greed.The investigation leads to the vengeful wife of dead mafioso kingpin - who now controls the gang, a rail thin bookie and a land play aimed at building a casino. But who stood to gain the most from this murder? Ulfelder keeps the tempo high, the action intense and hits all the high notes. One killer is expected, but the other is not. He reveals one adversary early on, but the other planner and killer will take some hard hitting investigating to discover and Sax will have to outwit and escape some nasty situations in order to catch the hidden assailant. Its a fine mystery.
review 2: The fourth book in the Conway Sax series, Wolverine Bros. starts off with Sax going to L.A. to track down Kenny Spoon, the has-been TV star son of Eudora Spoon, a wealthy ex-alcoholic and close friend of Sax. Dying of cancer, Eudora wants to reconnect with her youngest son, and Sax, a part-time mechanic and full-time problem-solver, agrees, no questions asked. Only this time, he probably should have asked some questions. Once in Los Angeles, Sax, with the help of an ex-cop friend named McCord, discovers that Kenny Spoon is being held hostage by a tough-as-nails Brazilian gang. Resourceful as ever, Sax manages to extract Kenny from the situation and fly him back to Massachusetts to see Eudora. . .but then the very next day she is shot and killed. Questions abound as to the motivation for the killing. Was she murdered by the Brazilian gang as payback for taking Kenny Spoon? Or was it someone after her considerable land holdings, land where a casino could be built someday? Whoever is responsible, Sax makes a solemn vow:“No gray. . .Not this time. Everybody pays.”Like the other installments of this series, the plot in Wolverine Bros. is engaging, fast-paced, and action-packed. I was particularly impressed with the monologue-type feel to Sax’s narration, the way you can actually hear the narrator’s distinct voice as you read, almost as if Conway was sitting in your living room, iced tea in hand, telling you a wild story. Another impressive aspect: the clipped prose and short paragraphs, both of which keep the story move, move, moving, and give the narration a sense of immediacy and urgency. But what I really think is genius about these books is the well-rounded (and constantly-evolving) protagonist Conway Sax. As a reader, I can easily identify with Sax, for he is practically everything good fathers attempt to teach their sons: he is tough, honest, reliable, capable, and persistent. And those qualities are sorely missing in people in general and men in particular these days. In my book, that makes Conway Sax a bonafide hero, a flawed yet honorable man who knows the difference between legal and moral, between right and wrong, AND has the guts to do more than just talk. But if you require more evidence that this is a truly dynamic character, here’s a quick quote from page 77 of Wolverine Bros.“It struck me once while watching the National Geographic Channel. . .that I was a certain kind of pilot fish. . .They’re parasites–they swim alongside sharks, waiting for a kill, surviving on fallen morsels. . .I don’t wait for a kill and snap up morsels. I ease the need. . . I find need. I attach myself, swim alongside. . .It’s the attaching that bothers me. What would I be, I sometimes wonder, what would I do if I was purely on my own?”This is but a small sample of what makes Conway Sax the most realistic and most compelling of PIs out there today, what makes him the natural successor to tough-but-moral private eyes like Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer. Any serious fan of the PI/hard-boiled genre should be reading Ulfelder’s books. I cannot recommend them highly enough. less

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