Briarpatch
by Ross Thomas
Summary
Benjamin Dill gets the call in Washington: his sister Felicity, a homicide detective in the unnamed Sunbelt city they grew up in, is dead, a bomb wired to her car. Dill flies home for the funeral carrying a second errand, he works as an investigator for a Senate subcommittee, and his childhood friend Jake Spivey, now rich in the arms trade and holed up in the old mansion on the hill, is the witness his committee wants against a former CIA colleague turned freelance seller of everything.
Thomas runs the two strands as one braid, because in this city they are one: Felicity's murder unravels into cops on retainers, real estate money, and the particular civic rot of a town where everyone useful is owned by someone, while the Spivey business unspools the international version of the same market. Dill, dry, watchful, a professional witness to other people's corruption, moves through funerals, depositions and propositions collecting the truth about his sister, which arrives in pieces the book prices honestly: what she was investigating, what she had become to survive it, and who decided a detective's car should burn. The famous Thomas texture carries it, deal makers rendered in perfect dialogue, every institution a market, cynicism worn like seersucker, and the ending trades justice against arrangement in the ratio the real world uses.
Around three hundred and twenty pages.
Best for readers who want the political thriller at kitchen table scale, Washington's great cynic working a hometown murder with the same ledger.
Historical Context & Significance
Briarpatch won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1985, the second for Ross Thomas, whose 1967 debut The Cold War Swap had taken the first novel prize, and it stands as the distillation of his particular franchise: two decades of novels about fixers, bagmen and professional betrayers, admired by peers with an intensity the bestseller lists never quite matched, the writers' writer of American political crime.
Thomas had lived the research, press agent, union campaign manager, political consultant on several continents, and his cities run on the mechanics he had operated; the unnamed Sunbelt town here is his native Oklahoma City, disguised thinly enough for family recognition.
His champions kept the flame after his death in 1995, reissues carried Lawrence Block's introduction among other tributes, and the book found a second audience when the 2020 television series Briarpatch, with Rosario Dawson as a gender flipped Dill, carried the title back into circulation, the fixer's Sunbelt intact.