The Donut Legion

October 1, 2022

Charlie Garner is worried: former wife Meg, who worked at a donut shop run by a shadowy evangelist cult that believes their compound will soon host an extraterrestrial Second Coming, has gone missing. Some investigating leads to a giant stash of weapons and a leashed chimpanzee--but still no Meg. Edgar and multiple Bram Stoker winner Landsdale takes a break from his "Hap and Leonard" series; with a 25,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 5, 2022
In this wildly funny if uneven crime yarn from Edgar winner Lansdale (Moon Lake), PI-turned-novelist Charlie Garner is confronted by an apparition of his ex-wife, Meg, at his home in east Texas, who warns him to “beware the great mound within the circle.” Unnerved by this ghostly visitation and still holding feelings for his former spouse, he stops by her apartment complex in nearby May Town, but discovers that she and her new husband have mysteriously disappeared. With the aid of his brawny older brother, Felix, who runs a private detective agency, Charlie explores Meg’s connection to the doughnut store where she worked and to UFO fanatics who worship a local site where it’s believed a flying saucer is buried. Shocking revelations and a spate of grisly deaths spur Charlie to get to the bottom of Meg’s disappearance, no matter how hazardous the quest. Though sluggish in places, sharp dialogue and outlandish characters, like the dastardly Cowboy and his flamboyantly dressed chimpanzee, Mr. Biggs, make this high-spirited conspiracy especially enjoyable. Lansdale reliably delivers the goods. Agent: Danny Baror, Baror International.

February 1, 2023
Lansdale takes a break from his loopy tales of Hap and Leonard for an East Texas story that's much, much weirder. It begins straightforwardly enough: Charlie Garner's ex-wife, Meg, drops in at his isolated home in the dead of night to ask his help in dealing with the death, possibly the murder, of her husband, Ethan Phillips. As a former cop and former PI, she argues he's just the person to investigate. Charlie, who's identified as a writer for a while now, is reluctant, but before he has to decide, Meg vanishes, along with the tracks her car must have left in his driveway. Baffled and troubled, Charlie turns to Felix Garner, the older brother who took over his detective agency even though it paid less well than practicing psychiatry, and together they decide to break into Meg and Ethan's apartment, where the police duly arrest them. Rescued by Felix's girlfriend, whip-smart attorney Cherry Shires, they soon find themselves seeking the truth about the Saucer People, a cabal of UFO fans whose numbers included Meg, and the Donut Legion, whose head Manager, a seriously bad dude called Cowboy, is best known for his companion, Mr. Biggs the chimpanzee. The trail to the truth is enlivened by Charlie's fling with Amelia Moon, whose friends call her Scrappy, and littered with corpses, some shot, some stabbed, some stacked up in freezers. Despite dollops of Lansdale's trademark off-speed humor, the otherworldly aspects of the mystery are seriously muddled, and the whodunit, which might better be labeled a whathappened, is seriously disappointing. Don't worry: Lansdale will surely be back next year with something more welcomely earthbound.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2023
Charlie Garner is a former PI turned writer living in the dusty byways of East Texas, but he's forced to give investigating another whirl when his ex-wife, Meg, and her new husband disappear. Whether in his celebrated Hap and Leonard series or in many fine stand-alones (Moon Lake, 2021), Lansdale has always displayed a master chef's hand at blending genre and tone--horror, crime, coming-of-age realism, black humor--into perfectly emulsified, tasty entr�es. He's at it again here as Charlie, brother Felix, and wacky fellow investigator and would-be author Amelia ""Scrappy"" Moon follow Meg's trail to a donut shop run by a cult that calls itself the Saucer People, so-named for the mound on their compound that they believe shields a flying saucer that will soon transport believers to a new world. Before takeoff, however, the cult, led by a psycho called the Cowboy and his enforcer, a chimpanzee answering to Mr. Biggs, has some doubters to dispatch--cue the severed limbs. Mixing horror and thriller is fairly commonplace these days, but few can match Lansdale at finding wit and tenderness bobbing along in the wake of the gore.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.