3.13.2009

Starred review from Booklist

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Issue: April 1, 2009


Mating Season.
Loomis, Jon (Author)
May 2009. 304 p. St. Martin's/Minotaur, hardcover, $24.95. (9780312367701).
When Kenji Sole is found stabbed to death in her lavish Provincetown, Massachusetts, beach home, Detective Frank Coffin and Sergeant Lola Winters have no lack of suspects. The beautiful and wealthy victim had a voracious appetite for sex with a rotating cast of older, married men, whose bedroom activities she recorded surreptiously, while her carriage-house tenant ran a home-based porn business. And she had just threatened to have her rich attorney father declared incompetent after he changed his will to favor his young mistress rather than his daughter. Amid the investigation, Coffin must find his dementia- suffering mother, who has run away from her nursing home, and work at impregnating his girlfriend, who desperately wants a baby. Meanwhile, Kenji’s hidden DVR becomes the hot potato that could solve the crime. Coffin’s second outing (after the acclaimed High Season, 2007) hardly could be better: Loomis’ prose is crisp and smart, and his characterizations ring true, with none more appealing than Coffin himself, a cop with a phobia of corpses. Reminiscent of Robert B. Parker at his best.

— Michele Leber


I loves me some Booklist. And I loves me some Michele Leber, too.

3.09.2009

Publisher's Weekly Reviews MATING SEASON

Mating Season Jon Loomis. Minotaur, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-312-36770-1
Det. Frank Coffin and his partner, Sgt. Lola Winters, look into the stabbing death of notoriously promiscuous dominatrix Kenji Sole, who had a gift for bringing out a man's “inner jerk,” in Loomis's riotous second mystery to feature the Provincetown, Mass., cop (after 2007's High Season). The investigators rattle nearly every skeleton in the official closets of the ultraliberal community as well as a few cages in the state attorney general's office. Between panic attacks and feeling increasingly tuckered out by fervid attempts to get his much younger yoga-instructor lover pregnant, Coffin confronts a number of life's real tragedies—in particular, the wish of his Alzheimer's-stricken mother to die. Such serious concerns lend depth to a black comedy full of raunchy vocabulary and kinky sexuality. Loomis appears to enjoy shock effects too much for their own sake, but he's definitely a writer to watch given his knack for illuminating human nature. (May)


Mention a dildo and people go all vapory on you...