Counting Coup

G. D. Gearino

I'm sure most of the people who read Counting Coup will see the last ten pages coming from a mile out; I was completely blindsided by them, and that's probably coloring my judgment of this little gem. It was raised from a competent, wicked novel about a southern mystery into the realm of the truly great whodunits. In fact, the montage of revelations in those last ten pages feels a whole lot like the montage of revelations Chazz Palminteri goes through in the last few minutes of The Usual Suspects. Yeah, it's that good.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tad Beckman's first editor once told him that journalists get cocky, and then they take a big fall. In the opening pages of this novel, that's exactly what happens to Beckman, the kind of op-ed guy everyone wants to tell their problems to; he's having a bad day, a woman tries to tell him her problems, he's brusque with her, and she ends up very nastily dead. He then disappears for a year, and upon his return to civilization, a cause, and a reason to start writing op-ed pages again, almost literally falls into his lap. It's too much to pass up, and Beckman starts digging into the details of the life of the man whose wife he's now acquainted with, the man who wants to buy his historic-landmark apartment building and tear it down, an all-around nasty guy if ever there was one. He just can't get over the idea that something is just a little bit off…

I realized how much was going to like this book when I hit the halfway point, was still involved in the setup (that year-long disappearance, and his getting involved in the mystery at hand, takes quite a while), and realized I didn't care. In the hands of a less talented author, that much setup for fifty or so pages of actual mystery can be a slow- moving disaster; Gearino uses it to weave in not only clues as to what's happening, but events from Beckman's childhood to make us understand why he's so eager to take on a new cause celebre as soon as he gets back to civilization. Gearino makes us understand his charge; that, more than anything, is what propels this book into the stratosphere. Well, that and the last ten pages.