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The Ditched Blonde is one of the strong Carl Wilcox novels in the middle of Harold Adams's long run, and it shows what the series is for. Carl, the itinerant sign painter who keeps finding bodies, picks up work in a South Dakota town and almost immediately notices a young woman whose presence does not quite fit. By the next morning she is dead in a ditch.
Adams's great gift is the voice. Carl narrates in a particular Plains-states deadpan that has the rhythm of someone who has been working hard for too long to bother lying. The Depression-era texture is rendered without sentiment: people are tired, money is short, and small-town politics are unfair to the same people they have always been unfair to.
The case resolves cleanly. The ending earns its weight. Four stars. The Carl Wilcox series is criminally underread.
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