One strange thing hard-boiled mysteries often have in common: The coffee tastes bad.
In Jenny Siler's Iced" (Henry Holt, 246 pages, $24), the heroine, Meg Gardner, drinks coffee that is "strong and bitter, the dregs of a pot that undoubtedly had been cooking away since that morning. But it was hot and I was bone-cold and happy to have it."
Gardner lives in Missoula, Mont., where she has to deal with not only bad coffee but also bad company and plenty of threats.
She served time in a New Mexico prison for what she considers small-time offenses (bad checks, stolen merchandise, fraud) and had "the misfortune of getting caught on the one transgression that carried some weight 18 months worth of weight, to be exact." Once released, she starts over in Missoula and gets a job repossessing cars. Unfortunately, she repossesses one car too many, a Jeep owned by a man who has just been killed.
Various people use Gardner as a punching bag as they try to uncover secrets hidden in the Jeep. She meets some colorful characters during her courageous fight to stay alive and to learn the truth, while trying to solve a mystery in her own family.
Although the plot is entangled, Siler never loses control of it. She definitely knows how to tell a story. There is even a pleasant intrigue involving a pilot who lost his plane and its valuable cargo during a storm. The man had been looking for the plane for several years before realizing that he had been tricked.
Ice plays an important role in "Iced," and the suspense and some of Siler's best descriptions are related to it. For instance, a corpse found in a river "has a layer of ice encasing him. ... The brittle skin around him looked like a thin cocoon. He was perfectly preserved, the violence of his death completely intact."
But in spite of the wonderful writing and the sustained suspense, there is something missing. Gardner tightly guards her feelings, so it's hard for the reader to sympathize with her plight.
Compared to her, even Sam Spade seems personable.
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