The Yard Dog

July 6, 2009
Set in Oklahoma at the close of WWII, Russell’s engrossing mystery casts light on a little-known corner of American history. When harmless indigent Spark Dugan winds up dead in the Waynoka rail yards, the local yard dog (i.e., railroad detective), Hook Runyon, decides the man’s death was no accident. Runyon soon learns that mild-mannered Dugan may have been involved in a local ring smuggling army goods. As more details come to light, Runyon begins to suspect a big-time operation that involves foul play at a nearby Nazi POW camp—and possibly a local oil tycoon with a penchant for lavish living. With the help of the camp cook and community moonshiner as well as the POW camp’s English teacher, Runyon and his friends are soon ensnared in a dangerous investigation that’s anything but routine railroad detective work. Russell (Dreams to Dust
) impressively contrasts the book’s raw, colorful characters with the harsh Oklahoma landscape.

July 15, 2009
Murder near an Oklahoma POW camp.

After Hook Runyon lost much of his right arm in a car accident, his wife Janet, who was driving, added insult to injury by leaving him. Though he's ridden the rails and engrossed himself in books in the years since, the sting of her abandonment and the memory of his missing limb remain vivid. He lives a solitary life, bunking in a caboose and working at the Waynoka train depot, his only friend the similarly outcast moonshiner Spark Dugan. When Spark is found dead on a block of ice beneath a reefer car, only Hook seems to see anything suspicious or to care. On the death certificate, he defiantly lists the cause as homicide and resolves to investigate. A few miles to the north is the POW installation Camp Alva, which holds a group of German prisoners. Hook figures to check it out as part of his probe, not knowing what the reader has already learned: Dr. Reina Kaplan has just been assigned to the camp to implement a propaganda program—forbidden by the Geneva Convention—involving German soldiers. Though Major Stan Foreman, the Camp Commander, stonewalls Hook on his first visit, he's undeterred. He uncovers more secrets, suffers a brutal assault and finds a surprising new love on his way to solving Spark's murder.

As a mystery, Russell's (Dreams to Dust, 2006, etc.) moody story misses the forest for the historical trees, but readers engrossed in the mid-1940s world he evokes won't mind.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from August 1, 2009
Historian Russell presents a little-known sideshow of World War II, the presence of POW camps for German prisoners in the American Midwest. He sets his story primarily in the Waynoka, Oklahoma, railroad yard where the German POWs sometimes work in the ice plant. Hero Hook Runyon (Hook because he lost an arm and his chance to serve in the war some years back) ekes out a living by serving as rail-yard detective. When his buddy, a mentally challenged yard scavenger, is found crushed to death under a car, Runyon suspects murder. A visit to the victims hut, in which he hid army-issue clothing, suggests a connection with a smuggling operation and hints that the victim was in possession of something other people wanted bad enough to commit murder. Runyon gets an inside perspective on the POW camp from an English professor (female and Jewish) whom the U.S. government, improbably, assigns to the camp to educate the Germans in American ways. The intrigue expands into Nazi art thefts. This is a marvelous read, especially for the way that Russell depicts the long reach of the Depression on peoples lives. Russell is also the author of Dreams to Dust: A Tale of the Oklahoma Land Rush, which won the 2006 Langum Prize for Excellence in American Historical Fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)