Bear Hug

Bear Hug is the third Tim Lyon mystery from Jerome Doolittle, with the DC-based investigator drawn into a Maine-set congressional-staffer murder case that the press corps has been quietly covering and the major Beltway players would like to make go away. Doolittle's working knowledge of both Washington and rural Maine gives the book the kind of dual-geography texture the form rarely manages.

Doolittle's strength in Bear Hug is the careful rendering of both ends of the investigation. The Maine sections (the bear-hunting subculture that the title refers to, the specific small-town politics of a congressional district that has been quietly losing population for decades, the local press relationships) are handled with the same insider attention as the DC material. Fans of Ross Thomas's political thrillers or Tom McGuane's Montana fiction will recognize the careful regional procedural register.

The case resolves with appropriate weight.

Three stars. A small underread series at its strongest. Recommended for readers of political crime fiction with serious regional commitment. The Bear Hug Jerome Doolittle novel is one of the better entries in the Tim Lyon sequence; read in series order for full effect.