I posted on author Duane Swierczynski‘s Facebook page this week that I thought it highly suspect that this “Would you prefer to be lost in the woods with a man or a bear?” online meme took root just as his new book came out. In return, I only received a laughing emoji, so I’m not entirely convinced he didn’t plan the whole thing, LOL.

The male characters in this book would certainly make women tend to choose the real bear over any of them as a preferred companion. We have an opportunistic, venal ex-LAPD cop; another man convicted of murder who is out of prison after just a few years due to a technicality that overthrew his sentence; a dormant but still terrifying serial killer; at least one copycat; and a Hollywood producer; and it’s hard to say in the beginning which of them is the worst!

The book is a send-up of the true-crime franchise, particularly the television biopics that exploit the circumstances of people’s worst days ever by giving a voice to killers, rapists, and the like. The basic, initially somewhat confusing story is that Cato Hightower, a retired cop, has worked hard to get Jack “Killer” Queen out of prison because he wants a piece of the payoff Queen will receive for supposedly being wrongly convicted. But Hightower also has a vision of Jack helping him with ongoing “projects,” one of which is running down the serial killer known as the California Bear and blackmailing him to keep his name out of the spotlight. Ironically, however, the Bear (along with a few other people) is eager to get credit for his past reign of terror, over now for about 40 years, by working with a Hollywood producer named David Peterson to make a true crime feature with a big payoff.

The significant women “actors” are two: Hightower’s wife, Jeanie, who has turned her genealogy research into a business and in the process winkled out the identity of the California Bear; and Jack’s daughter, Mathilda Finnerty, who has just been diagnosed with a debilitating form of leukemia that keeps her hospital-bound but fails to dim her incisive mind as she seeks to prove her father’s innocence and also figure out the whole California Bear conundrum.

There’s plenty of exciting action in this book, although the switches from narrator to narrator prove occasionally confusing, especially when the story of the Bear takes an unexpected turn. But the charismatic characters of Mathilda and her anxious, guilt-ridden father carry the story and keep interest up to the end.

I promised a personal story to go along with this review, so here it is: Duane Swierczynski and his family were patrons at Burbank Public Library when I worked there as teen librarian from 2008 to 2019, and his two children participated in my teen programs. I was introduced to his books by one of my co-workers, who was a big fan, and we read his excellent book Canary in my high school book club. Later on, when I was teaching Readers’ Advisory and Young Adult Literature classes at UCLA in the masters program for librarians, I invited Duane to be a guest speaker, so I got to know him a little.

But the story involves the co-worker who was a major Swierczynski fan; when he was about to retire, I was racking my brain trying to think of a gift I could give him at his going-away party, and lit on the idea of contacting Duane to see if I could get an autographed book or poster or something to give him. Duane didn’t have anything lying around that would work, so instead he generously and surprisingly suggested that he could name a character after my friend in the book he was currently writing, and I enthusiastically accepted. Then I interviewed Duane about significant elements and settings in the book, and I made my co-worker a certificate to announce my gift to him, which was actually a gift from Duane! Here is the certificate:

And that is how the true-crime producer in California Bear was christened David Peterson! He’s a bit younger and better dressed, but talks almost as much as the real David, and it was really fun to read the book, knowing the back story.

There is another, sadder back story that involves Duane’s daughter, Evie, the model for the character of Mathilda, but I’ll let you discover that one for yourself by reading the book (and the afterword).

Weirdly, just a couple of weeks before I started reading this book I saw a notice on Facebook on the “Lost Angeles” page that Patrick’s Roadhouse, a major setting in the book, had closed; reopening is subject to the negotiation of a new lease, which depends on an initiative by a former customer to raise $250K through a GoFundMe to pay back rent (they got behind during Covid) and do some renovations. They have raised more than $70K so far; if you’d like to contribute to bring back this 50-year icon on the Santa Monica coast, here’s a link to the fundraiser:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-save-patricks-roadhouse-a-california-icon