Omaha Noir

The last time I waxed poetic (now it’s Poetic’s turn to wax me, as Groucho might say) about Doolittle, for Rain Dogs, I suggested that he was too good to be a writer of original paperbacks all his life. Belay that: he is, as Laura Lippman says in a jacket blurb for his latest, “a cult writer for the masses” – a title which fits several other writers (Dickens, Doyle, Dostoyevsky) whose last names also happen to begin with D. The Cleanup is about a terminally hopeless Omaha cop who winds up as a night security guard at a supermarket, and it could well be the best thrills-for-the-buck reading bargain of the year.