Review of Bastard’s Bluff: David Benjamin’s Small-Town Whodunit

Title: Bastard's Bluff

Author: David Benjamin

Publisher: Last Kid Books

ISBN & Price: 9781735772219, $18.64

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Review by Betsy Lepchitz

Bastard’s Bluff, by David Benjamin, is a who-done-it hidden in a small town drama with sprinkles of complicated families, both blood and found. With characters that beautifully walk the line between caricatures of small-town tropes and dynamic voices you can hear as you read, Benjamin draws us into the odd but comforting world of Jim Otis and the inhabitants of Hercules, Wisconsin. Comforting, that is, until a mysterious new hate group, apparently from Hercules, appears. 

We first meet Otis at his overnight security job, having recently lost his position of chief of police due to a misunderstanding driven by a conniving Prom Queen. This scandal arrives on the heels of the one that brought him to town—a similar tale of an affair gone wrong. Despite the judging glares from some of the inhabitants of Hercules, and as much as he feels like the town pariah, Otis still has townspeople who would call themselves his friends, even if he doesn’t feel worthy of the title. They range from a beloved bartender, an old hippie town gossip, a lovable drunk, and Otis’ current paramour, Carol, a high school teacher. 

The trust this eccentric cast of characters maintains in Otis is exactly what draws him back into the crime-solving world when a mysterious vandal known only as “B.B.” starts committing hate crimes in the normally idyllic small town of Hercules. 

It starts small; a horrendous vulgarity painted on the door of A’Jay’s Bar, owned by the only black man in Hercules. Under the slur are the initials, B.B. Not much later, the initials appear again under the vandalization of a late but beloved Jewish tailor’s grave. The attacks continue, increasing in their vicious nature until blood is finally drawn. Still, there is no further information—no clues to go on, no stated motive, no clear pattern. All Otis has is a correlation to Bastard’s Bluff, home of the reclusive Norman Klinghofer. The evidence, as sparse as it is, seems damning to the town hermit. 

Still, while the local sheriff believes it’s an open-and-shut case based on the B.B. initials and a possibly spurious website that explicitly implicates Klinghofer, and despite the hermit’s distrust of technology, Otis has what he and his daughter call “cop instinct.” Otis has too many unanswered questions, too much doubt, and a nagging feeling that there is more to the mystery than meets the eye. What unfolds is a complicated scheme involving lost loves, bitter grudges that come to a head, social outcasts used as unwitting pawns, and technology as a weapon. 

Otis navigates the ever-increasing hate-based attacks while also fielding calls from his teenage daughter, Natalie, who lives with Otis’ ex-wife and new boyfriend in Chicago. Natalie has an increasingly uncomfortable situation of her own with her mother’s squeeze. Otis is forced to balance the role of father, former cop, and cooperative ex-husband, while deciphering whether Natalie’s stories are accurate or are tainted by her loyalty to Otis and distaste for man in her mother’s life. 

This tension boils under the surface for Otis while he still tries to maintain order in a town ready for vengeance after yet another act of violence. Benjamin deftly allows his readers to put the pieces of the mystery together alongside our grudging protagonist, feeling the same excitement at the final standoff between what’s been presented as fact and the truth of the situation.

Written with characters and their voices front and center, Benjamin paints an engrossing picture of what happens when small-town drama grows into something terrifying and deadly. Still, Benjamin adds in levity at just the right moments to give the reader a chance to breathe so we’re ready and excited for the next development in the case. Readers root for the curmudgeonly ex-cop and his eclectic family in Hercules.