Local author’s thriller set in Ohio full of plot twists and turns
The pleasures of reading a well-paced, well-written thriller are only enhanced when the mystery takes place in your own state and your own city.
Robin Yocum, who worked for years as a reporter for The Dispatch before turning to writing crime novels and true-crime books, has set his new novel in a parallel universe: Ohio and Columbus.
“The Sacrifice of Lester Yates,” to be published Tuesday, stars Hutchinson Van Buren as Ohio’s Republican attorney general, a former prosecuting attorney who prefers putting criminals away to the bureaucracy and politics of being the guy in charge. He answers to the Republican governor, “Big” Jim Wilinski, a former football star who calls subordinates “padnah” and has a sexual appetite that isn’t satisfied by his beauty queen wife.
The governor’s eyes are on the prize of becoming the Republican presidential nominee and he’s indicated that he’ll tap Hutch to be his U.S. attorney general.
Possibly standing in the way is a little problem of a serial killer who dumped 18 women’s bodies in the Egypt Valley Wildlife area of southeastern Ohio. The hapless Lester Yates, found using one of the victim’s credit cards to buy a fishing pole, has been convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. But a prison guard at the Northeastern Ohio Correctional Facility has serious doubts about his guilt as does, eventually, Hutch.
So begins chapter one — “eight weeks and one day before the scheduled execution of Lester Paul Yates” — and the race is on to discover the truth behind the murders.
The novel is a sequel to Yocum’s “Favorite Sons” (2011), also narrated by Hutch Van Buren and telling the story of an accidental death and cover-up in a small industrial town in Ohio.
In “The Sacrifice of Lester Yates,” Hutch is older, more seasoned and more cynical, allowing Yocum to write him a bit like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, albeit in the 21st century.
Here’s Hutch describing his campaign manager: “She walked across the room in a way that could make a man forgive a thousand of her sins. In my eyes, there was not a woman alive as beautiful as Shelly Dennison, and not one as calculating, strong-willed and dangerous. Mostly dangerous. I knew the moment I started sleeping with her during my first campaign that I was on borrowed time. She would slip between the sheets with the leading candidate for Ohio attorney general until someone more powerful and influential became available.”
Yocum has a gift for characterization, from his matronly African American administrative assistant, Margaret, who dismisses anything that Hutch does or says that she disapproves of with “mmm-mmm-mmm” to the hard-boiled investigator Jerry Adameyer, nicknamed “Amana” because he was built like a refrigerator, and the tenacious intern Denise Liberatore, who grew up on the refined streets of Upper Arlington but has the grit and smarts of someone from the mean streets.
Real Columbus and Ohio restaurants, buildings, streets and people are scattered among the fictional in Yocum’s prose. One of the victims has the same name as a Thurber House staff member; the narrative quotes a newspaper article by the real Associated Press reporter Andrew Welsh-Huggins and Yocum has Hutch drop in on a number of real restaurants and diners such as the Roosevelt in Bellaire, Ohio. These local references almost give the novel a cozy feel — if it wasn’t about trying to execute an innocent man for murder.
While there are multiple murders, only a couple of them figure importantly in the plot and Yocum is clever at pulling the threads that tie the pieces of the overarching crime together.
“The Sacrifice of Lester Yates” is a good read — full of bantering dialogue, plot twists and a sense of place that’s gratifyingly close to home.
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