Mountain Intrigue

In Killer Weed: A Rick Ryder Mystery, R.F. Wilson once again brings us Rick Ryder, a fictional detective living in Asheville.

Rick is a man of many talents. He is an attorney, a private investigator, and a sometime employee of the Mountain Center, a group dedicated to land preservation in Western North Carolina.

Rick is also an amputee—he lost his left arm in a traffic accident in his teenage years—and is a recovering alcoholic. He also has an eye for younger women and once nearly ruined his marriage to his wife, Kathy, a real-estate agent. The tension created by that indiscretion remains in their marriage.

Like most suspense mysteries, Killer Weed tells a complicated story. There is a young man dead, Brian McFadden, found by Rick and two others at the bottom of a waterfall. No one is certain whether he slipped while high on drugs or was pushed. Queenie Weaver, who owns this parcel of land, wants to save the land from developers, which is why she is talking with Rick. After refusing to sell her land, she has received threatening phone calls. After Brian’s death, investigators find marijuana growing on her property, and she is arrested.

And here the plot begins its twists and turns. Enter Stan and Martha Jo, his young weed-smoking, hard-drinking wife. Stan acts as caretaker for Queenie’s property, and for a while seems a possible suspect in Brian’s murder. But then he turns up dead as well, supposedly a suicide. Adding to these complications are Maisie, a neighbor of Queenie’s whose house is torched and who ends up in a nursing home; Pete Haywood, a sometime minister and high-stakes gambler in various business deals; Nate, a friend of Rick’s and fellow attorney; Audrey, who asks Rick for his help because she feels someone is tailing her and intends her harm.

Without giving away too many details, Killer Weed should appeal to mystery and suspense lovers for several reasons.

First, Wilson does a fine job incorporating many local landmarks into his story. As Rick makes his way through this tangled case, he visits many familiar places, ranging from Malaprop’s Bookstore to New Mountain Café. His descriptions of the landscape—a good part of the book takes place on Queenie’s property—reveals a writer with a love of the mountains. Early in Killer Weed, for example, Rick describes the view from Queenie’s porch: “The sky was an unblemished expanse of Carolina blue, the humidity below 50 percent, the kind of day the Chamber of Commerce would like to bottle and use for marketing.”

Wilson also brings a keen eye to the characters in this novel. Readers who have lived here for a while have undoubtedly met a Queenie, a curmudgeonly old woman with a kind heart, a woman who in her younger years gave life quite a ride. We’ve met the old country boys described here, as well as the real estate agents, the attorneys, and the law officers. His description and development of Martha Jo, a former stripper who married Stan and knows more than she will share with Rick, is particularly fine.

Finally, there is Rick Ryder himself. Because of his background, Rick is a character who interests us. In addition to being a man of many talents, he is generally affable yet not above certain impetuous acts of daring. He thinks clearly and usually takes the time and effort to consult others before rushing into a situation. Unlike some fictional investigators, Rick probably strikes most of his readers as a man they would enjoy as a supper guest or as a next-door neighbor.

Because of his own background, Wilson is also able to speak authoritatively about drugs, alcohol, and addiction. Having worked for over 30 years in the addiction field, Wilson makes us feel the temptations of Rick Ryder to drink and what happens to those who avoid such temptations, particularly Martha Jo, Brian, and Stan. Wilson’s knowledge extends also to drugs. He gives us many details on both marijuana and on pharmacological drugs, as when Rick goes through Martha Jo’s medicine cabinet following the murder of Stan.

One aspect of the novel I found a little confusing was Rick’s relationships with the women he comes across during his investigation. Because of the earlier trouble in his marriage, he is wary of all the women he meets—several of whom attract him—yet he at the same time seems irresistibly drawn to them, in spite of his love for his wife. It was difficult to determine whether he was simply feeling the normal urges of a man in his time and place or whether he had some sort of sexual addiction.

Fortunately, R.F. Wilson will help clarify this situation in his next novel, Deadly Dancing, set to be released May 1.