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Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
Sunday, September 29, 2002
By
Michael Helfand
A
good dictionary will tell you that a badger is (aside from a
burrowing animal) a lawman or a person who transports goods.
A badger game is a con in which a woman (usually) uses her charms
to expose, compromise and then blackmail a man.
There
are several badgers and badger games in Jon A. Jackson's new
thriller, which is something of change from his hard-boiled
mysteries set in Detroit. The inspiration seems more John LeCarre
than Dashiell Hammett in a book that begins on the Balkan peninsula
and ends outside Butte, Mont.
Agents
and double agents abound as governments, drug dealers and the
Lucani, a group of government employees secretly operating outside
the law, try to capture a badger and the loot from an international
smuggling operation.
From
his previous novels, Jackson has taken two morally ambiguous
characters, Joe Service, a free-lance contractor for the Detroit
Mob, and his lover, Helen Sedlacek, the daughter of an assassinated
Mob boss.
Like
Nick and Nora Charles, Joe and Helen make sparks fly, although
their preferred method is nude wrestling, not cocktails.
Joe,
who once worked for the Lucani, is hired by its ranking officer
to find Franko, an American badger who had connections to Kosovar
spies and drug dealers and was rumored to be in Montana. Shortly
after arriving in Butte, the couple learn that someone else
is looking for Franko. At this point, the situation grows increasingly
complex.
But
Helen and Joe adapt. They develop their own agenda, and, if
you get lost in the labyrinth, rest assured that almost all
the characters are in the same blind alley.
It
takes more than a dictionary to sort out one kind of badger
from another, and it's a pleasure to see Jackson resolve it
all while sustaining the ambiguity. of goals and motives of
most of the players.
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Michael Helfand is an English professor at the
University of Pittsburgh.
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