Book Review: A Pint of Problems

Title: A Pint of Problems 

Author: Chris Lowry

Date: 2019

Publisher: Grand Ozarks

Quote: "There were too few perfect legs."

When we meet Jake Burbank, a young lawyer who's decided he's failed, he is lolling about, drinking himself to death and letting himself be exploited by a woman who doesn't love him but has perfect legs. He's a parody of what young men say they want their lives to be. His life is described as a baseline of chronic pain alternating between acute misery and the distractions of his few remaining pleasures, sex and alcohol. There's no logical reason why Gretchen, the owner of the legs, is even wasting her time on him, but he agrees to try to gather evidence in support of her claim to her older paramour's estate, which she says is being disputed by her younger paramour, who was his son.

Gretchen is pure trailer trash, all about money. Jake didn't grow up rich himself, is squandering a legacy from the one client whose interests he tried to represent before the dear old man died, and doesn't blame Gretchen for taking every possible man for every possible dollar she can take. Let the young man try to find his own source of income, his own way--Jake and Gretchen at least worked for a few years in their early twenties, so why can't he?

Jake's thinking runs into correction patterns, however, when he finds himself under arrest for a murder he didn't commit, in a set of mysterious circumstances that show every sign of a corrupt legal system. He has one thing going for him: a police detective from out of town who's not part of the old boy network. Her name is Maggie. She obviously cares about Jake, but when they get time for a private conversation, she frostily tells him she prefers "girls." Whether Maggie really is a lesbian, or meant that as a sarcastic index of how pathetic an alcoholic Jake's become, remains to be disclosed in the sequels. In this novel, although there's also a flirty bartender who looks good to Jake, he is strictly Gretchen's ex-boyfriend. (They went to school together, he later tells Maggie.)

But he's still young; he still has a way to go before destroying his body. He can still make the men who are sent out to beat him up wish they'd gone into a different line of work, and does on at least three occasions in this novel. He has something to do at last: find out what's really going on with Gretchen's more recent boyfriends, and who wants to hasten his demise, and why. 

If you like a mystery with physical danger and multiple fight scenes, you may enjoy the five volumes of Jake's adventures. I prefer fiction with less violence but I must say this is one of the most professionally written novels I received in the Booktober Blitz.

I personally found Jake boring, as a protagonist, but I'll forgive the author for that because Jake is a classic alcoholic. Until they "hit the bottom" of their addiction, alcoholics are boring. That's the nature of the disease and, if anything, I'm impressed by Lowry's ability to portray a deadly boring disease while keeping readers awake.