Review: The Feral Detective

Jonathan Lethem (Lucky Alan; Motherless Brooklyn) turns the traditional private eye novel inside out. Still told in first person, The Feral Detective isn't narrated by the investigator, Charles Heist, but rather by his client, Phoebe Siegler.
 
Phoebe is struggling to deal with the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and abruptly leaves her job. With time on her hands, she agrees to fly from New York to Los Angeles in search of her friend's missing teenage daughter, Arabella. A social worker refers Phoebe to Heist, a PI who specializes in finding children. However, Phoebe isn't quite prepared for what she finds when she meets the detective with the strange nickname: "He resembled one of those pottery leaf-faces you find hanging on the sheds of wannabe-English gardens. His big nose and lips, his deep-cleft chin and philtrum, looked like ceramic or wood." In Heist's desk drawer is an ailing opossum named Jean and in the armoire a young girl named Melinda who "isn't much for moms and dads." Nevertheless, Phoebe persists and Heist agrees to make some inquiries about Arabella. What he discovers leads the pair to a world that's utterly foreign to Phoebe but only too familiar to Heist.
 
Accompanied by his three dogs, Heist takes Phoebe to a homeless community in a drainpipe, to the Buddhist Zendo on Baldy Mountain and to the Mojave Desert, where they encounter two groups living off the grid and in the midst of a violent conflict. Finding Arabella and returning all humans and canines safely back to civilization may be easier said than done.
 
Lethem crafts a complex plot with swift momentum as well as a meticulous sense of place throughout the novel. He envelops his readers in the sights, sounds and smells of The Feral Detective's environs. Here he describes the efforts to levee storm water from the drainpipe where the homeless community resides:
 
"A rotted couch had been placed in the center of the flow, to make a bulwark the water had to work under and around. Despite the sizable stones and chunks of shattered pavement that had been added at every breach, and the soaked clothes and rotting blankets, the tarps and tenting employed to cement between the stony stuff, the water did."
 
Here, the compound of the desert-dwellers:
 
"One instant we trudged pathless sands. The next, around a rise, we'd entered a maze of human signs. Small habitations littered a span of landscape: huts like the two we passed, a few teepees, yes, and also half-submerged, tin-roofed pit dwellings."
 
In his characters, Lethem creates endless depth. Phoebe's sarcasm functions as a defense mechanism in a world she's no longer able to comprehend. Heist, on the other hand, comprehends his world only too well and finds comfort in silence. An odd pairing who ultimately fit perfectly together. Dark, funny, brutal, honest, The Feral Detective delivers an engrossing mystery written with fortitude and beauty. --Jen Forbus, freelancer
 
Shelf Talker: An unusual detective agrees to help locate a missing teenage girl and finds himself and his client in the midst of a tribal war in the Mojave Desert.
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