The Long Way Out

January 1, 2023
This is a second look at Wiley's glum hero Franky Dast, who has plenty to be glum about. In his inaugural adventure (Monument Road, 2017), 18-year-old Franky was wrongly imprisoned; he didn't kill those kids. He spent eight years in prison before being sprung by the Justice Now Initiative, a group devoted to freeing such victims as Franky. He goes to work for them, tracking down the youngsters' real killer. We rejoin him as he gives time to a woman who rescues big cats--lions and tigers--from abusive private zoos. Clunky symbolism, yes, but a fascinating look at her world. His opens up when he takes on the murder of a teenage Hispanic girl for a good PI reason: ""it's the only way I can figure out if I'm still here."" It's here, around page 45, that a fine detective story begins. More murders, with a white-supremacist tinge, until the last one. It skews the story nicely, being reminiscent of a memorable line from Peanuts: ""Unrequited love is the spites of life.

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November 14, 2022
Set in North Florida, Wiley’s strong sequel to 2017’s Monument Road matches an unusual protagonist with a plausible and gripping plot. Nine years earlier, Dast was convicted of murdering two adolescent brothers based on perjured police testimony. He spent three years on death row, and five more in a Supermax facility, before his exoneration. Dast’s success after his release in finding the brothers’ real killer demonstrated his talent as an investigator. Those skills are sought by a desperate family when 14-year-old Antonia Soto, a Mexican immigrant, goes missing. Dast, who’s been working at a rescue facility for big cats, regularly picks up chicken carcasses to feed his charges from a poultry farm where the teen’s father worked. He got to know Antonia in the process, but refuses to help look for her, believing her disappearance was probably voluntary. That decision haunts him after her body is found with a gunshot wound in the back of her head. Dast investigates her murder and a second, possibly related one. Wiley carefully balances story developments with his exploration of the psyche of a lead committed to justice despite being denied it. A third series entry is more than warranted. Agent: Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary.

November 1, 2022
After a five-year hiatus that Wiley devoted to franchise hero Sam Kelson, ex-con Franky Dast returns for another shot at getting his life straightened out and incidentally solving some murders. It's easy to see why the author's left Franky to stew in the Florida heat for so long. Even though he didn't commit the heinous crimes for which Police Det. Bill Higby sent him to death row, he's not exactly likable. When Alejandra Soto asks him to look into the sudden disappearance of her 14-year-old daughter, he declines and doesn't change his mind until Antonia Soto's found shot to death in Clapboard Creek. Higby and his somewhat less hostile partner, Lt. Det. Deborah Holt, are convinced the killer is Carlos Medina, the older boyfriend who got Antonia pregnant. But Franky thinks the murder is the work of someone with a deeper animus, and his suspicions are fueled by racist city councilman Randall Lehmann, whom he knocks down at a pro-immigration rally staged by attorney Demetrius Jones as the TV cameras roll. None of this endears Franky to his old nemesis, who's unconvinced by the murder of Kumar Mehta that all this could have something to do with race. After all, Mehta was a model South Asian, a successful man in town to visit his equally successful children. The cops don't get it even when someone scrawls racist graffiti on the walls of Franky's hotel room and ensures his ouster by tossing a Molotov cocktail at the place. The abduction of Cynthia, Franky's hypermetabolic lover, kicks the case into high gear, but still not for the police. A searing portrait of an acknowledged lowlife bent on doing God's work.

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