Plains Crazy (2004)

The third in the Mad Dog & Englishman series

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING

"It's a very entertaining and just a plain crazy read."

Michelle Shealy, MyShelf.com

"Hayes' fans will not be disappointed. And there is a new factor: Hayes himself seems to be having fun as the series develops."

J.C. Martin, Arizona Daily Star

"With an abundance of eccentric characters, seemingly unrelated plot lines that manage to tangle themselves together and an overabundance of Murphy's Law at work, if you are not already a fan, this trip to Kansas will win you over."

Kathy Thomason, murderandmaynembookclub.com

"Yahoo! I want to shout, whistle, cheer, dance around in circles. A find, folks. A find. It is 4PM on Boxing Day and I have been reading since 10AM. I stopped for lunch, said "Hi," to my husband and kept on reading.

The Magic book is Plains Crazy. The book is funny, fast, scary, touching, well written. I love the people. I love the cars. I am madly in love with Mad Dog, Hailey and Mrs. Kraus. The climax is so exciting I was jumping around in my chair. If nail biting were a bad habit of mine, I would have no fingers left.

J.M. Hayes has written two other books, Mad Dog and Englishman, and Prairie Gothic. I have both on reserve at the local public library.

Do yourselves a favour and read these books. I am sitting here waiting for the next book in what appears to be a series."

Jeri Bates, DorothyL, January 4, 2005

"Plains Crazy is a delight. Zany, with at least a laugh a page. The storyline takes unexpected turns. It hies off in what seems like an unconnected direction and then slides back on course without a hitch. The action never stops... read this fun book and discover for yourself."

Mary Ann Smith, BookLoons

"Farce and satire are difficult to write well; it's all too easy to fall short or go way over the top. But in Plains Crazy, the third in J. M. Hayes' Benteen County, Kansas series, the author is right on. He's irreverent -- oh, is he! -- but he also clearly cares about people, and each chuckle, chortle and snicker comes with at least a slight tug at the heartstrings.

Let me see whether I can give a reasonable summary of the wild, wild plot. Benteen County is one of those places where nothing much of note ever happens, but one lovely spring morning, all hell breaks loose. A member of a crew shooting a film just outside town is found dead with a Cheyenne arrow in his back. Suspicion falls upon one Mad Dog, the brother of the town sheriff (whose name happens to be English). Mad Dog is part-Cheyenne and full-oddball, and he's been digging vigorously at his Native American roots.

Before Sheriff English can make much headway into investigating the case, though, bombs begin to go off all over town. Banks blow up, and public buildings, and convenience stores. Worse, there are notes indicating the nasty work is that of Al Qaeda. One of the bank tellers even thinks she saw Osama bin Ladin in the bank, just before the building blew.

In case there's not enough pressure on the sheriff, his wife, Judy, gives him an ultimatum, not her usual modus operandi: come with her that day to Wichita, to fly to Paris, or she'll go alone, and maybe not come back. Judy's been wanting to travel for years, and the sheriff, a Viet Nam veteran, has wanted only to stay in quiet, familiar Benteen County. But according to Judy, today is non-negotiably the day.

Meanwhile, the delightfully corrupt county commissioners are hard at work to line their pockets at the public expense, with a wind-farming scheme. All these explosions around town are not going to be good for business, they fear, and they make certain the sheriff knows how annoyed and inconvenienced they are.

It occurs to Sheriff English that his brother was likelier the intended victim of the mysterious archer than the killer. But whenever he begins to make a little headway into investigating one bomb blast, there goes another. A growing cast of eccentric characters joins the sheriff in running from site to site: aside from Mad Dog and Judy, the cast includes the sheriff's two daughters, both named Heather (trust me, it makes sense), the aforementioned county commissioners, Deputy Parker (who harbors a good deal of troublesome baggage from her prior law-enforcement job) and Deputy Wynn (known in the town as Wynn Some, Lose Some), the redoubtable Mrs. Kraus, who runs the sheriff's office in the county courthouse, old Bud Stone, a Cheyenne shaman, and even Janie Jorgensen (Mad Dog's lost-lost high school sweetheart, who has come back to tell Mad Dog that someone wants to murder him. There's even a mysterious motorcyclist who zooms in and out of the narrative, until...well, that might be a spoiler, so I won't tell you. The highly-visual story takes on the aspect of an early comic silent film, with all the apparently-disparate incidents and investigations finally coming together in a dramatic encounter at the Wichita Airport.

Hayes has a rare gift for being able to weave stupendous incongruities into a believable story. His is a tongue-in-cheek, out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth voice, producing hilarious contrast as he describes with sly understatement one wild occurrence after the last. He is at once funny and touching; sex and violence scenes are neither gross nor archly cute.

The book's pacing is superb,. Rather than having the story progress in a strictly-linear fashion, the author moves from one character in a particular location to another character somewhere else, often dropping back a bit in time, such that, for example, the reader sees a particular bomb go off from two or three vantage points. The effect is that of ocean waves on an incoming tide, and is very effective. I guess Sheriff English would be considered the protagonist, but at times I'd have sworn it was Mad Dog, Judy, or any one of a number of other characters. All Hayes' characters are rounded; he appears to believe that just as there are no minor people in this world, there are no minor characters in his fictional world. It works.

This is the third in the series (after Mad Dog and Englishman and Prairie Gothic), but I had no trouble reading it without prior exposure. I recommend the book highly, and I'm certainly going to go back and read the others."

Larry Karp, author of First, Do No Harm, from DorothyL, December 3, 2004