RANCHERO (2011) by Rick Gavin is one of those finds you manage to stumble across and are glad you did. I found it in a used book store and snatched it up. We were out of town and somehow I had forgotten to bring along my current read. The cover artwork wasn’t great but the coral pink Ranchero car/wagon/truck is shown at a rakish angle, what looks at first glance like a flaming guitar is shown as a sign for a night club (the flames are actually music notes coming out of the guitar) and the whole scene gives off a feeling of danger, sex, and action.
Nick Reid is a repo man working in the Mississippi delta area. A former cop out east, Nick is more than a bit down on his luck. He does have a best friend, fellow repo man Desmond, a large, laid back home grown inhabitant of the eastern shores of the delta who is there for Nick when a repo job goes way south on him. Not only doesn’t Nick get neither the big screen television or the money due, he is clonked on the noggin with a fireplace shovel and his ride, the Ranchero, is stolen.
This book is a fun ride through an area of America most people are not familiar with and probably never will be. Mr. Gavin has populated the book with Creoles and idiots and enough uncles and cousins to fit out any decent reunion. The humor is dark, there is a smattering of Sonic drive-ins (Desmond’s favorite eatery) strewn here and there, and twists more plentiful then a rollercoaster. Mr. Gavin has managed to take one borrowed car and built a unique story around it that is surprisingly fun.
Needless to say, the book I had been reading had to wait a while to be finished. You never know what great surprises await you in a used book store. By the way, there are two more books in the Nick Reid series so I suppose I’ll have to hunt them out and see if this was a one off or the start of something big. ( )

4 meth-addled stars.

This book was a lot of fun, a "hoot" as they might say in the Mississippi delta region. It's sort of a hick-lit, with some noir and revenge spree thrown in for good measure. Think [a:Carl Hiaasen|8178|Carl Hiaasen|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1208367876p2/8178.jpg] on meth, trying to avoid cottonmouths and gators deep in the delta. I'm not even going to try to describe the book any more than that.

If you're looking for a humorous, quick read, pick up this book. ( )

********THIS WAS A GOODREADS.COM CONTEST WIN!!!!!!!!!!**********

This was a good interesting read. The author had captured my interest in the book from the beginning. With the talk about the area, culture, and life in part of the southern states makes this book come to life. I do not know a lot about the area described in the book but the author had the agriculture correct. I highly recommend this book to people that like to read crime-mystery.

********THIS WAS A GOODREADS.COM CONTEST WIN!!!!!!!!!!********** ( )

"Fresh Meat" by Clare Toohey for Criminal Element

Ranchero by Rick Gavin is peopled with real characters in an authentic South, the Mississippi Delta to be exact, who think and speak with the natural wryness of the place. That makes it twice as funny as the usual caper, and I’m not just whistling Dixie.

Forget silly cariacatures from people who don’t really know the South or who generally hold it in contempt, no one can dish its sins with greater hilarity and humanity than one steeped in the tea. Perhaps it’s because of all the laconic, flinty Scots-Irish that populated the place, but there’s a deadpan flatness when conveying horrors matter-of-factly. Gavin just nails that specific Southern langauge and cadence.

(Read the rest at http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2011/10/fresh-meat-ranchero-by-rick-gavin )

Ranchero is Rick Gavin's debut novel and, fun as it is most of the time, it shows in places. I'm in Florida, home of Hiaasen, Barry and Dorsey, and I'm no stranger to bizarre characters and over-the-top situations. As we follow repo man and ex-cop Nick Reid in his effort to recover his landlady's stolen Ranchero, we get a real sense of life in the Mississippi Delta and the whacked-out people who live there. The plot gets muddied in the middle but, like the clinically-insane Florida novels I love, the plot is rarely the reason to read. ( )