{"id":2510,"date":"2021-08-05T17:04:29","date_gmt":"2021-08-05T17:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2510"},"modified":"2023-03-07T17:05:23","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07T17:05:23","slug":"the-houseboat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=2510","title":{"rendered":"The Houseboat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lyrical, moody crime novel\u2014there\u2019s no mystery and just a smidgen of suspense\u2014set in small-town Oscar, Iowa in 1960, a town \u201cas plain as a white wall.\u201d When a young couple, spending the night on the banks of the Mississippi River, are attacked\u2014and the young man is murdered\u2014local sheriff Amos Fielding knows he needs help, so he calls for regional backup. He\u2019s rewarded with Edward Ness from Minnesota, a stylish detective who hasn\u2019t put down the bottle since his wife and young son were murdered seven years earlier. We follow Ness as he discovers and flirts his way through Oscar. But soon enough the narrative turns to Rigby Sellers, a terrifying, angry recluse\u2014with coke-bottle glasses and a \u201cjutting brow and a bent nose, a patchy beard and an incomplete set of long jaundiced teeth\u201d\u2014who lives on a decrepit houseboat moored on the river. Still not convinced of Sellers\u2019s creepiness? His lovers are mannequins that he dresses and paints for their date nights. Days go by without a confirmed suspect but with plenty of rain, and a long-standing drought gives way to a swollen Mississippi that rips through the town, upending it. When more bodies are found, the townspeople are, literally, up in arms, and Sellers is directly in their cross-hairs. <strong>Hard to put down and even harder to forget, <em>The Houseboat<\/em> is a poignant rendering of a place and time.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lyrical, moody crime novel\u2014there\u2019s no mystery and just a smidgen of suspense\u2014set in small-town Oscar, Iowa in 1960, a town \u201cas plain as a white wall.\u201d When a young&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[54,55,82,50],"class_list":["post-2510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-historical","tag-mystery-detective","tag-small-town-rural","tag-suspense"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Houseboat-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Houseboat-400x600.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}