James D. Doss (1939–2012)

This reviewer has two main problems with The Old Gray Wolf, only one of which can be laid to the author. It's part of a series. It is the 17th (and final) book in the "Charlie Moon Mystery" series -- a fact which would have pushed it off the TBR stack and into the donation bag, had it been apparent beforehand.

Admittedly, that's a personal preference; however one of the biggest problems of more-or-less stand-alone novels within long series is that the author, having established characterizations early on, may not spend much time acquainting the new-to-the-series reader with the ins and outs of the players. Returning readers would find it tedious, but the newcomer doesn't learn much about what makes the character tick. That absence is present in spades here. All we know about the two main characters are that Police Chief Scott Parris is a retired Chicago cop and his best friend / part-time deputy, Charlie Moon, is a cattle rancher and member of the Ute tribe. And, oh -- Parris is packing a few extra pounds and Moon is tall and skinny. We know that because Doss reminds us every few pages.

Okay, as noted above, authors have no responsibility to ensure that readers who casually pick up a book come to it with a full understanding of previous volumes.

But the second, and for more damaging factor, is Doss's folksy, intrusive, and over-written style. For the first few pages, it's kind of fun, but after a couple of chapters, it becomes an annoyance and -- ultimately -- a real barrier to finding the meat of the story. Doss apparently never met a simile he didn't want to spin into a story of its own, and almost every page has a cringingly-bad example. A character, surprised by someone else's statement "...lurched like an anteater whose yard-long tongue has just licked a tasty six-legged delicacy off a pulsing electric fence". You get the picture.

Plotwise, it's pretty thin broth. A petty felon, arrested for purse-snatching, dies while in custody. Because both Parris and Moon had clocked the guy in the process, it's assumed that they caused his death. (In reality, an earlier close encounter with a saloon bouncer and a fire plug had started the brain bleed which did him in.) However, this salient detail is unknown to the thief's mother, a heavy-duty gangster mom, who promptly hires a mysterious assassin to "make them suffer the way [she has] suffered". The rest of the story unreels as assorted characters find out about the hit, try to notify Parris and Moon and/or keep the contract from being carried out.

There are several deaths before everything is untangled, though how Moon figures it all out is left rather vague.

There are a few chuckles along the way (mostly early on, before Doss's cutesy style has become cloying), and one memorable character -- Moon's honorary auntie, a Ute tribal elder who talks to spirits -- but they are sparse rewards for what is essentially a mystery story without much mystery and a suspense tale lacking suspense.… (mer)