Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
When Rich Men Die is Harold Adams’s 1987 fifth Carl Wilcox mystery, set in the same 1930s Corden, South Dakota where Adams’s entire series operates. Carl Wilcox, sign painter, occasional fistfighter, recovering alcoholic, and the town’s reluctant unpaid investigator, comes home from a roofing job to find that Lloyd Brann, the town’s wealthiest banker, has been beaten to death in his office. The official suspect list is short. The unofficial one, the one Carl assembles by drinking coffee in the right kitchens, is considerably longer.
Adams is the Sherwood Anderson of American crime fiction: small-town, plain-prose, attentive to class and silence in ways the genre rarely is. The Depression-era texture is granular without being museum-tagged (the price of a sandwich at Boswell’s café, the way relief work is actually handed out in 1930s rural South Dakota, the way the local bank ran or did not run). Carl himself is one of the great underread series narrators in American crime fiction, an alcoholic with no romantic arc and no rehabilitation trajectory, just a job to do and a town to live in afterward.
Recommended for fans of regional American crime fiction (James Lee Burke’s early Dave Robicheaux, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone) and for readers looking for books like When Rich Men Die at the intersection of Depression-era setting and small-town procedural. Four stars and a strong entry into a wrongly forgotten series.
Related reads
If you liked When Rich Men Die
A Way With Widows
by Harold Adams
Another Carl Wilcox novel. Harold Adams at his most observational about how small communities deal with desire.
The Ditched Blonde
by Harold Adams
A mid-period Carl Wilcox novel. Harold Adams writing the Depression-era prairie with the kind of dry honesty that the form usually pretends to.
Hatchet Job
by Harold Adams
A mid-period Carl Wilcox mystery by Harold Adams. Depression-era South Dakota, an itinerant sign painter, and a community that knows how to keep its own counsel.
The Lincoln Lawyer
by Michael Connelly
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly 2005 review. Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles defense attorney who works out of the back of a Lincoln Town Car, takes a case that pulls him into something larger. The novel that launched a series and a film franchise.
Big Little Lies
by Liane Moriarty
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty 2014 review. Three mothers at an Australian elementary school converge on a kindergarten Trivia Night where someone will die. The contemporary domestic-suspense novel that defined the late-2010s book-club shelf.
In the Woods
by Tana French
In the Woods by Tana French 2007 review. Dublin Murder Squad detective Rob Ryan is assigned to a child murder in the same woods where his two best friends disappeared twenty years earlier. The Edgar winner that launched the strongest contemporary literary-crime series.
More by this author