A poor country woman and her kids are being terrorized by Porky, a rampaging hog that keeps breaking out of a neighbor’s pen. For help, she turns to Hap Collins and Leonard Pine in Joel R. Lansdale’s 14th darkly comic novel about the duo, “The Hatchet Girls.”
Hap and Leonard aren’t animal control experts. They, along with Hap’s wife, Brett, are private detectives. But the woman is so distraught that they take pity on her and agree to subdue the enormous creature. It does not go well.
The hog chases the two pals around the yard, crashes into the woman’s house when they seek refuge inside, and trashes the place. The result is perhaps the funniest man vs. beast scene since Mark Wahlberg brawled with his teddy bear in the 2012 movie “Ted.”
Once they manage to get Porky under control, they examine the neighbors’ outbuildings and discover why the animal had been so aggressive. The neighbors were meth cookers, and Porky had been sampling the merchandise.
Hap and Leonard are still poking around the place when the neighbors, the Planter family, show up, take exception, and make themselves the target of our heroes’ wisecracks and sarcasm. Since Hap and Leonard are also capable of extreme violence when provoked, the reader is apt to anticipate a showdown. But it is not to be.
Instead the Planters later turn up dead, their bodies chopped to pieces by The Hatchet Girls, a cultish gang of women who hate men and are determined to take over the meth business in this corner of rural Texas. When more meth cookers get hacked to bits, both the region’s drug kingpin and the local sheriff enlist the P.I. partners to put an end to The Hatchet Girls.
Hap and Leonard take on the task somewhat half-heartedly, distracted by life changes. Leonard, who is gay, is planning to get married. Hap and Beth are moving into a new home. And both of the men contemplate getting out of the violence business to run a gym.
“The Hatchet Girls” is a bit of a letdown, neither as suspenseful nor as funny as last summer’s “Sugar on the Bones,” but fans of Hap and Leonard may find it entertaining enough to hope for another installment.
Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line.”
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