THE TWENTY- ACRE PLOT: A Hackshaw Mystery

N.Y.: Saint Martin's Press, 1991. 1st edition, July 1991, with complete number line beginning with 1. Fine in fine dust jacket, not price clipped, with protective mylar cover. "Another entrant in the son-of-Raymond-Chandler sweepstakes as Wilcox--who can write a wonderfully crusty, wry turn-of-phrase- -introduces upstate New Yorker Elias Hackshaw, who, with his sister and brother-in-law, produces the weekly Triton Advertiser, including his muckraking opinion column. Here, he takes aim at unscrupulous land-developer Oscar Kasnen, convinced that the shopping-mall builder is behind old man Jenkins's death-leap from a barn loft. (Jenkins's heirs were all too eager to sell off his land to Kasnen.) Then Jenkins's lawyer is put into a coma; an Indian who may have been Jenkins's illegitimate son is murdered (mistaken identity); and Hack, to the chagrin of pedantic, poker- playing banker Kimble, discovers that Kasnen's short-term loan guarantee is about to fold. Meanwhile, the heirs want the will probated; a consortium of pro-Kasnenites have bypassed town-meeting policies; and an irate semi-driver is careening down the highway in pursuit of Hack (for fooling around with his wife). A complicated ending assigns murder in one direction, the coverup in another, for a tough, funny, original approach to the hard-boiled genre, and more proof that second-novelist Wilcox (The Dry White Tear) is a comer." -- Kirkus Review. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine/Fine. Book.