She boinked Barry.

I can only assume she was also concussed and temporarily blinded.

Reliquary, 1998 ed, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Seeing that stupid model in Previews made me want to dig these out, and since I already featured The Relic, here’s the sequel. It’s good pulpy fun, if you can overlook the eyebrow-arch inducing plot point of having homeless people literally being dehumanized…

Dark Horse has a collected edition of the Dragon Age digital comic. If they know their fan-base, there should be plenty of Varric on Alistair action here.
(Yes, I’m still smarting from having my romantic choices in Dragon Age 2 limited to emo mage and emo elf.)

Boom’s collection of Howard Cruse’s non-gay work is due, and it looks like they’re including a healthy dose of his underground era work as well.

Seeing a solicitation for a Howard Cruse collection on the same page as ads for Garfield comics is one of those cognitive dissonance inducing moments you have to get used to when reading Previews…

Not gay, but…

I’m as big a fan of Special Agent Pendergast as the next guy, but a model of the creature from the 1997 film of a 1995 novel might be of pretty limited appeal…

Chapters 17-21

These chapters open with Parker determined to continue investigating Catherine Demeter’s disappearance, despite Walter Cole’s insistence that he stay and help the police track the Traveling Man, on the theory that, now that he has made contact with Parker he will seek to further the dialogue. After a discussion with psychologist Rachel Wolfe, inserting the requisite amount of sexual tension into the story-as Rachel, we are told, is the first person to awaken any sexual feelings in Parker since his wife’s murder-Parker becomes even more convinced that he must leave. Both for his own psychological well being-staying away from the man who killed his family, but also to avoid feeding into the desires of a psychopath. It’s Rachel’s additional analysis of the killer that cements Parker’s resolve. She points out that the man is highly educated, quoting both Joyce and the Bible in his conversation with Parker, but also highly fixated on Parker. The man is a certain threat to Parker and should be treated as such.

Parker leaves for Haven, trailed by a man and a woman in a jeep, too clumsily obvious to be federal agents and too conspicuous to be mob hitmen. Haven, when he finally arrives, is a decrepit, decaying town, a backwater in every sense. There is no industry to speak of and the shadows of the child murders still hang heavily over the town. It’s here that some of Connolly’s strengths as a writer become apparent. He is able to very quickly sketch out believable characters for what are essentially supportive and expository roles by relying on character types. Familiar tropes that everyone is familiar with, allowing us to essentially get on with the story because we know what type a particular character is. Not that Connolly doesn’t sometimes over play this; Haven is populated primarily with racists and rednecks so outlandishly cartoonish as to pose a serious challenge to suspension of disbelief. A scene where Parker endears himself to the locals and attracts the attention of the police by picking a fight with wannabe Klansmen in a bar does much to increase Parker’s “badass antihero” quotient, but the effect is mitigated by having the odds stacked so broadly in his favor.

Parker’s investigations lead him to the library, where the microfilm of the local newspaper for the period of the murders has been hidden in the librarian’s office. Breaking in and reading it nets Parker the information that, prior to the disappearance of Catherine’s sister, the only local attention the crimes garnered were insinuations that the father of the first victim is responsible for disappearances of other black children. Breaking in also nets Parker a visit to the police station and a talk with Deputy Martin, a black officer transplanted from Detroit and apparently the only semi-competent officer in Haven. He warns Parker out of town, as bad publicity might scare off semi-mythical “Japanese investors” the town is relying on to get back on its feet, but ultimately agrees to arrange for Parker to interview local attorney Connell Hyams and Walt Tyler, father of the first victim.

Hyams doesn’t offer Parker much in the way of information, citing both client confidentiality and the fact that he was technically away at law school at the time of the crimes, but he does provide an interesting insight into Adelaide Modine. She was born a twin, but her twin brother was still-born. Hyams compares Modine and her family’s affect on Haven to that of a hyena pack, in that brutally metaphoric way that so many of Connolly’s characters have of talking. The Modine’s were a matriarchal and fraticidal family and they despoiled the region. It’s a quirk of Connolly’s to have characters talk in such self-consciously literary ways, but it’s one of the small details about his work I find pleasurable.

That evening, Parker’s precautions of breaking into the room next to his hotel room and sleeping there instead pay off, as the man and woman from the jeep break into the room he was supposed to be in and start firing. In a short action sequence Parker kills the man and beats the woman into a coma, suffering some heavy blood loss from a shotgun near miss in exchange. Deputy Martin is even more eager to have Parker leave town, but after some eavesdropping on a phone call with Walter Cole decides that the attempt on Parker’s life indicates that Catherine Demeter is in real danger and quite probably in Haven somewhere. That his superior, the sheriff whom Catherine contacted, is still missing-or rather, “on vacation”-goes some way to driving this home.

The Hunting of the Snark, 1995 ed, Lewis Carroll
My proposal that we should refer to unearned overpraising of pop culture productions, particularly ones that hadn’t even actually been released yet, as “boojum” never went anywhere…