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OK, I admit it. I deliberaly kept ONE MORE BODY, the latest Moses McGuire novel, for my last review of 2013. I've been a fan of his since BEAUTIFUL, NAKED & DEAD came out in 2011 and author Josh Stallings couldn't bang them out quickly enough for me. Well, they cannot all be home runs, can't they? I was all aboard the Moses train for BEAUTIFUL, NAKED & DEAD and OUT THERE BAD, but ONE MORE BODY left me with conflicted emotions. On one side, it probably is Josh Stallings' most technically sound novel, but on the other hand, it didn't felt like a Moses novel very much to me. If the two first books were home runs, consider the latest chapter a sacrifice fly with one RBI.
Action picks up on a Mexican beach, as Moses is saying goodbye to a dear friend and trying to find a little peace and quiet. If you're familiar with the series, you know that Moses deserves more than anybody to be left alone. But trouble finds him again, in his own home, this time. A woman named Rollens threatens him into finding her niece, who's been kidnapped and forced into the sex trade (the kid has her own, conaiderably smaller chapters). Moses being the old, romantic moose that he is, cannot bear the news of a child in trouble. Better yet, he sees her as another swing at the evanescent concept of redemption he's been more or less chasing for several years.
I'll give it to Josh Stallings, the more time he spends narrating the adventures of Moses, the louder his character's voice becomes. Never before in the series you could see beyond the barrier Moses set between himself and everybody else. The weight of his actions is adding up on his shoulders, he is starting to crack, to see things and I thought (as a long-time fan) that it was very appropriate for the character. It seemed like a natural evolution of the relationship with Moses to witness what the terrible amount of violence has done to him.
My issue with ONE MORE BODY is that there is way too little of that. It feels a little overcrowded, to a point where Moses' presence in the story seems borderline useless. ONE MORE BODY didn't feel like a Moses novel to me. I didn't buy the validity of the threat he faced on the beach at the beginning. I bought even less in the credibility of Rollens, the character who threatened him. The main reason why I read Moses McGuire novels is that I empathize with his desperate longings for things that don't quite exists and I found very little of that in ONE MORE BODY. Maybe it was meant to be a conclusion to his adventures? I'm not sure what happened there.
I enjoyed witnessing the mastery of language and the inception of a Moses McGuire's own idiosyncratic syntax through the pages of ONE MORE BODY. Narratively speaking, it wasn't my cup of tea and I'm not sure I like the direction the character is taking. Moses has become akin to an urban legend, a righteous avenger of the downtrodden. If you're into into moral cautionary tales and a slightly ''graphic-novelish'' approach, you will probably think ONE MORE BODY is the best of the series. I like my crime fiction more tragic and morally dubious. It breaks my heart to say it, but I think Moses and I are growing apart.