Dead of Winter by Stephen Mack Jones
This series features a biracial Black-Mexican protagonist who lives in Mexicotown in contemporary Detroit. August Snow is an ex-cop who was bounced from the police force for turning in some bad cops. He later received a $12 million wrongful termination settlement from the city which gives him the freedom to help rebuild his sketchy neighborhood while solving crimes and helping people get out of trouble. August is a Marine veteran who saw nasty action in the Middle East and has learned to defend himself and fight his way out of dicey situations.
August’s “job” is buying distressed properties and using a gang of local talent to fix them up and sell them at low cost to people in the community who need housing. HIs main crew is Jimmy Radmon and Carlos Rodriguez. He’s lived in the neighborhood his entire life. His Black father was a Detroit cop and his Mexican mother worked at a local restaurant while he was growing up. The owner of that food shop, Senor Ronny Ochoa, is dying of cancer and wants August to buy the business. August demurs; he does not want it. His daughter, Jackie, a businesswoman in LA, doesn’t want it. Jackie’s lawyer, Danny, says that if no one buys the store, a Mr. Sloane, a shady real estate developer will buy it, and perhaps do something to improve the neighborhood. Sloane is playing hardball with Ochoa by threatening to expose the trouble the young Ochoa got into years ago because of gambling debts.
August’s best friend is Tomas, who also helps him out from time to time. Tomas shares August’s outrage about the potential blackmail. As they begin to do some digging, August hears a rumor that a local crime boss, Marcus “Duke '' Ducane, may be involved in selling drugs in Mexicotown and in strong-arming Senor Ochoa to sell to Sloane. When August was a police officer, he built the case that sent Ducane away for five years in a minimum-security federal prison. Duke was grateful; it could have been a much tougher sentence, and since his release, Ducane and August have helped each other out a bit. Duke still does some sketchy stuff but he plays straight most of the time.
August and Tomas go to Duke’s headquarters, which looks like the set for a Quentin Tarantino movie. They are convinced that Ducane is not involved in either of the rumored activities. The former crime boss is ticked off that someone is trying to set him up so he offers to help August figure things out.
August returns home and hears loud, happy noises coming from his neighbor’s house which is occupied by two elderly women and Lucy Three Rivers. She is a twenty-something year-old Native computer whiz who keeps the old ladies in check and helps August out on cases.
In November, as the first snow hits Detroit, Jackie Ochoa visits August. He had a crush on her when they were teenagers. They have cocktails and she flirts with him while asking him to make sure that her lawyer, Danny, is not trying to cheat her family.
August and Tomas decide to stake out Mr. Ochoa’s store at night to prevent bad things from happening to it. They take turns watching the place from their cars and walking around to inspect the premises. One night Tomas gets shot. He’s in bad shape as he heads off in the ambulance. At the hospital, August is greeted by Detective Captain Leo Cowling, a man who has no use for August. It turns out that Mr. Ochoa is also dead in what is supposed to look like a suicide but really doesn’t. Cowling leaves. Then Tomas’s wife, Elena, confronts August and slaps him for getting her husband shot. Jackie Ochoa also shows up with lawyer Danny in tow. It’s getting crowded. Jackie has mixed feelings about her father’s death. He was suffering and only had a few months to live anyway. August and Danny insult each other and the chapter ends.
August feels terrible about what happened to Tomas so he has a bit to drink and calls up his priest and good friend, Father Grabowski, who is attending a conference in Las Vegas. (Who knew priests conferenced in Vegas?) The good priest lets his buddy vent and gives him some sage advice. All you can do is the best you can do but sometimes things go haywire. It will get better.
August gets a call from Tomas’s daughter, Manolita, who suggests that he should visit Elena – Tomas’s wife and Manolita’s mom.
August has a girlfriend, Tatina, who is biracial - Somali and German, an interesting combination. She is a professor at a college in Oslo. August was not sure they could have a long-distance relationship so he texted Tatina to break up.
Big mistake. She shows up and says “Nobody breaks up with me via Skype! Nobody!” Lucy happens to be there and is enjoying the show. She and Tatina have been Facebook friends and they have bonded. Lucy reminds August that he’s a jerk for breaking up with Tatina, especially via Skype.
Tatina sees booze as a problem for her boyfriend these days so she dumps all of the alcohol down the sink. They then have a heart-to-heart talk, and Tatina reminds her beau that they are both half-breeds, which can be a bit rough.
Tomas’s wife, Elena, drops in and she and August patch things up. She gets a call from the hospital and Tomas is out of his coma and on the way to recovery. Things are looking up.
In the middle of the night, somebody's knocking on the door. August gets his pistol – it’s a rough neighborhood - and sees Sweets, a local African American legend in Detroit. He has a criminal record but knows everybody and everything that is going on in the city. He’s helped August in the past and they are buddies. Sweets has heard that three thugs from New Jersey have been brought in to kill August for snooping around on the real estate deal. It turns out that Sloane, the developer, wants to buy the late Mr. Ochoa’s property to build safe houses to hide international thugs - drug dealers, murderers, deposed dictators and such. There’s a lot of money in that. Sweets also confirms that Duke Ducane has nothing to do with the bad stuff going on. Good information all around from Sweets, whose real name is Delmonico Firenza, not an intimidating street name.
As part of her effort to improve her boyfriend, Tatina takes August to buy a new car to use in the winter instead of his classic fully restored 1969 Oldsmobile 442 muscle car, which is terrible in the snow, August buys a huge SUV which Tatina observes is bigger than some villages in Norway.
August has done some digging, He goes to Danny Romero’s (Jackie Ochoa’ s lawyer) office and confronts them. He says that he’s figured out that Danny shot Tomas and killed Mr. Ochoa and Jackie was in on it. Back in LA She’s in huge debt and needs the money from selling her father’s store. The elusive Mr. Sloane shows up and hears that August has figured things out, at which point Sloane runs away. Jackie pulled a gun on our hero who promptly disarms her. August leaves.
Mr. Sloane calls August and confirms that there is a hit squad out to get our boy. August visits Detective Captain Leo Cowling and brings him up-to-date on the case while giving him Jackie’s pistol which was used to shoot Tomas and her father.
August gets a text from “Duck” telling him to meet at an outdoor market at 11:30 that night. Clearly the NJ thugs aren’t too bright. They sent the text and misspelled Duke’s name. August shows up early, and, with help from the real Duke and his thugs, kills two of the assassins in a gun fight and lets the third one get away. Before one of the Jersey boys dies he gave them information about who is calling the shots behind the real estate deal.
August puts on a power suit and presents a filched business card to Mr. Vic Bronson’s receptionist. Bronson is a big deal in Detroit development. August gets nowhere but he does manage to run into Bronson. They speak and Bronson does react to the mention of Sloane’s name. August gets kicked out of the building but he’s learned something.
At 3 AM that night August goes out to stake out Bronson’s palatial estate. As the sun is coming up he gets bored and decides to break into the estate. August uses tasers and stealth to get by the security detail and confront Bronson who is stepping out of the shower with his young boyfriend. The three of them have a productive discussion. It turns out that Bronson is being blackmailed to get the real estate deal done. His daughter is in school in Switzerland and bad guys have threatened to hurt her unless her father comes through.
Bronson knows that there are international bad guys behind the project which will put these safe houses in shaky neighborhoods to make them invisible to the authorities. August figures out how to keep Bronson’s daughter safe in Switzerland and then he heads home.In one of his previous cases, August did a favor for a European assassin who just kills bad people. The Cleaner, as he is known, assures August that he will protect Bronson’s daughter, Emmaline, and neutralize the people who are threatening her. The Cleaner also pledges not to kill anyone unless he has to.
August meets his local city councilor, Nadine Rosado, for lunch. She shares a recording of a phone conversation between city councilor Lincoln Quinn, a crook, and the mysterious Mr. Sloane. Quinn is in on the real estate deal. He’s getting money to make it happen. Sloane also tells Quinn that the councilor’s ex-wife, who was getting big alimony checks, is deceased. Sloane’s people took care of that and if Quinn does not make the deal happen, the police will get evidence incriminating him in her death.
August is incensed and goes to Quinn’s luxurious downtown office and slugs him and confronts the councilor about his role in Sloane’s scheme. Quinn, who fought mightily against the settlement with the city that made August rich, is nervous about the deal. He thinks he’s in over his head with Sloane and his crew. Quinn gives August a lot of information about who is really running the deal – Xi, a Chinese guy, is the contact, and the person known as the Albino is Mr. Big.
Meanwhile, Sloane has gone off the grid and taken $10 million with him which will anger his bosses.
August is really getting worked up about the push to convert Mr. Ochoa’s store into a safe house for international terrorists/thugs. He is worried that the bad guys will get Tatina or Lucy. He decides that he’s not quite ready to marry Tatina. However, he does love her so he has Father Grabowski make up a commitment ceremony for them. The newly committed couple go to a restaurant that features Motown artists as entertainment and they have a great time. As August is parking his SUV barge, he gets knocked unconscious and spirited away.
It turns out that the kidnapper has nothing to do with the real estate deal. He’s Lieutenant Valentino Hayes, one of the crooked cops who managed to avoid prison and hates August for blowing the whistle on the bad cops.
Hayes is beating up our boy who is handcuffed. Things don’t look good until Tatina shows up with a pistol. Tatina shoots Hayes in the arm. He tries to shoot her so she kills him. Tatina and August don’t have a problem killing bad people. She was raised in Somalia during terrible times. She learned to defend herself from murderers and rapists.
Hayes really hurt August who almost dies in the hospital. The doctors save him. August has no idea how Tatina found him. It turns out that Lucy put a GPS tracker on August so they could find him. She is a good techie.
While recuperating in the hospital, August gets a call from the Albino, who is very close to the big boss. Xi wants August to give back the $30 million he stole from Sloane Of course the money was not stolen, but Sloane did run off with it. The Albino seems to believe August.
Tatina learns of a terrorist attack at her mosque in Oslo so she goes home.
Lincoln Quinn, the crooked city councilor, was worried that he was in over his head with the international cabal that is trying to set up the sleazy safe house. He was right. He ends up dead with his head separated from his body. Things are starting to happen.
Victor Bronson, the big real estate developer who is worried about his daughter in Switzerland, was kidnaped and harshly interrogated. He’s in the hospital, sort of replacing August who left.
After a few weeks, August has recovered from his beating. He and Jimmy are having lunch at a restaurant when they are visited by Xi and the Albino. This is not good. Jimmy fends off Xi’s attack and knocks him out. The odds have gotten better with Xi down. This is a stalemate so Xi and the Albino leave.
Back home, Lucy informs August that the Cleaner who is protecting Bronson’s daughter ended up killing two goons who were trying to kidnap Emmaline. They did not succeed in their task and ended up frozen and dead in the river. The Cleaner warns everybody that the Albino, whose real name is Bojing, is furious that the kidnapping was foiled and will get really nasty now.
August starts to plan how to survive this. By now, he and Tomas have healed from their various injuries and are plotting and scheming so that they and their loved ones survive. They don't have to wait long. The Albino invites August to meet him for dinner at a closed wildlife observatory, the Anna Scripps Whitmore Conservatory, on Belle Isle on the Detroit River. It’s clearly a set-up but August thinks he can turn the tables.
Tomas and August pull together a team of helpers and they assemble enough weapons to start and win a small war. August dresses in his best Armani suit - he is a millionaire. He calls up Leo Cowling to make amends for the rough relationship they’ve had in the past, and then he and Tomas head off to meet their fate.
Once they get there, they quickly kill as many of the Albino’s goons as they can to even things up a bit. August gets captured and is brought to a nicely set dinner table where Bojing – the real name of the Albino – is waiting for him to have a nice last meal. One of the bodyguards brings in August’s friend, a badly beaten Jimmy Radmon, who tagged along to help out. Xi, the Albino's lead goon, is ready to cut off Jimmy’s head with a samurai sword, even before the appetizer. As it turns out, the Albino’s boss, who lives in France, is unhappy with how messed up the Detroit real estate deal has gone so Xi decapitates Bojing/Albino.
Things start to go crazy. The Frenchman gets shot wherever he is, probably by the Cleaner, who is good at finding and killing people - “cleaning” things up. August’s neighborhood protective squad, who secretly accompanied him to the meeting, open up and wipe out most of the bad guys. Duke Ducane shows up with his enforcers, the notorious oversized Compton Twins. Lady B., who owns Labelle's Soul Hole Donut Shop and also has serious weapons skills, joins the melee. Detective Captain Leo Cowling brings Detroit cops to the showdown. This turns out to not be a fair fight for the bad guys.
The remaining members of Bojing’s entourage escape via snowmobile. They have to be stopped or they’ll harm August and his crew down the road. Tomas and August grab snowmobiles and go after them. In a gunfight, August and Tomas shoot a couple. The Detroit Police Department helicopter shows up and gets the rest before they can cross the river and get into Canada.
The fact that international terrorists came close to building luxury safe houses for very bad people cannot be made public. Thus, the city has a press conference explaining the shooting at Belle Isle. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources sent armed people in to destroy a herd of sick deer that posed a threat to citizens. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
August and Tomas are nervous about what will happen to them since they violated numerous laws and killed a lot of people. The US government, grateful that some good citizens destroyed a terrorist group, worked in the background to paper over any unpleasant situations. Our boys are home free. Not quite.
August needs a vacation so he goes to Ecuador. He hires a local cabby/guide, Remy, who is obsessed with American sitcoms and can also get a gun with no questions asked. August is there because Lucy, a computer hacking whiz, figured out that’s where Sloane went to disappear with $30,000,000. It turns out that Quito, Ecuador, is home to one of those high-end safe-houses-for-sleazes communities, so Sloane took advantage of the opportunity.
August bribes his way into becoming a booze delivery boy so he can get close to Sloane and kill him. He gets to Sloane’s luxury condo and finds him dead, killed by a voluptuous woman who works for the CIA, as it turns out. The lady tells August that a friend of his is upstairs, where he finds Jackie Ochoa, the daughter of Mr. Ochoa who owned the desired property. She had taken off with Sloane and his money. She is bleeding to death, no doubt at the hand of Ms. CIA.
August returns to Detroit, buys the Ochoa property, known as the Authentico Foods Building, and deeds it over to Jimmy. August prepaid three years of city taxes and set up a bank account to help Jimmy get going in the business. August is rich, but he became richer in Quito. In Sloane’s condo he found a painting with a fake back that held $5,500,000 in bearer’s bands and cash which he managed to get back into the USA without being busted. That paid for Jimmy's new business.
August has PTSD from his time as a Marine in Afghanistan. He’s pretty much ignored it but Tatina insists that he do something about it. After he returned from Quito, he’s having a tough time sleeping and such. He goes to Father Grabowski who is much older and served in Vietnam and also saw a lot of awful things. He returned from Southeast Asia with PTSD before anyone knew what it was. It took years and years for the priest to get help, but he finally did and it worked. He sets August up with the therapist, Dr. Sussman, who lost a leg in Iraq. It works. After six weeks of cookies and coffee and crying, August starts to get better. He goes off to visit Tatina in Norway.
We shall see what happens in the next August Snow novel.
Bob’s Take
The author. Stephen Mack Jones is an African American who spent most of his life in advertising before he became a successful author. He worked in Detroit for 30 years before publishing his first August Snow book, so he knows the city, which features prominently in the novels. Jones uses Detroit as a character in his writing, much as Dennis Lehane highlighted Boston in many of his books. This series features a classic tough private investigator who has the most interesting group of friends, enemies, and associates that you will find in fiction.
The 442. August’s main ride is a fully restored 1969 Oldsmobile 442, a classic Motown muscle car. In 1970, I drove a candy apple red 442 with a spring-loaded Hurst four-speed shifter (Google it) across the country, from Waterbury Connecticut, to Los Angeles, California. I was transporting the car for my cousin’s husband who had a dealership and a customer who wanted that car. The trip was amazing. The Olds was hard to control, a good thing at my irresponsible young age.
Bob and Motown. My family lived in a Detroit suburb in the late 1960s when I was away at college. That was the time of the height of Motown, when Detroit was a thriving city that made America’s cars. Of course, the riots in the summer of 1967 were awful - 43 people died, 1,200 were wounded, and 400 buildings were destroyed over 5 days in July. I remember dutifully driving over to the 12th Street neighborhood where the riots happened to check things out.
On the other hand, Downtown Detroit was glorious back then, with the Big Three car manufacturers having their headquarters in impressive skyscrapers and the stores and restaurants thriving. Plum Street was Haight-Ashbury Midwest, with hippies and artists and food and drugs for all. I hung around the city on weekends when I was home from school in the summer. On Saturday nights on Woodward Avenue, a ten-lane main drag, there was a steady stream of informal car races. I would check them out from the safety of my candy apple red Plymouth with red line tires, a big deal back then. It really was Motown. Those were interesting times.
Family. The author uses a very broad definition of family. Your blood relations are your main family, but August has a lot of other solid support - the people in the neighborhood he put in houses, local thugs, Father Grabowski, Duke Ducane, and the donut mistress Lady B. to name a few. It is a truly diverse set of characters and they all happen to live around the neighborhood.
Lots of violence. This the third book in the series and they seem to be getting more violent. August seems to overdo it sometimes, killing someone who perhaps does not need to be killed to make the plot work. The author may be making the point that in the inner city, there is a lot of violence. Sometimes you need to shoot first and ask questions/beg forgiveness later. August also has PTSD which may trigger violent responses.
Food is big. August is a talented soul food/Mexican cuisine cook and he dines out in a lot of neat ethnic restaurants in the area. Often plans are made over a sumptuous meal.
Religion. August is Catholic, sort of. One of his best friends is a priest so that probably gives August a pass when he misses Mass, which is often. He does look to Father Grabowski for spiritual counseling as well as hands-on help when things get rough. Father knows a lot of tough dudes who have been very helpful to August in his work. Tatina is a Muslim, sort of, like a cafeteria Catholic. When her religious community needed her – when the mosque in Oslo was bombed – she headed home to help. While few of the characters in the books are regular church goers, they do connect back to their religious roots as needed.
