Black Hills

Schneider, the author of the memoir Canned: How I Lost Ten Jobs in Ten Years and Learned to Love Unemployment, has collaborated with his writer sister on this disappointing hard-boiled mystery, an indictment of fracking. The 200,000-sq.-mi. Bakken oil field in the upper Midwest has brought prosperity to the region since it went into production in 2000. The oil boom has also resulted in a huge increase in the drug trade, human trafficking, and greed in all its ugly manifestations. PI Alice, a former journalist, travels from her home in New York City to Whitehurst, S.Dak., in an effort to save Bobby, her ex-boss’s husband, from a trumped-up murder charge. Alice connects with a savvy local, Kim, and together they set off on a violent trail leading to a vast conspiracy. Weighed down by wooden characters and unconvincingly facile motivations, this novel oversimplifies a highly complex economic and social phenomenon to the point of unpalatable caricature. (Oct.)