Approached by the adult daughter of an old flame who’s dropped off the map, Happy “Hank” Doll heads up to Olympia, Washington, to delve into the subterranean world of the homeless and find the missing woman. What he doesn’t realise is that he’s being used in a nefarious and complex plan and nothing is as it seems.
Jonathan Ames’ second Doll novel, The Wheel of Doll, has a pretty good first half and then a much less compelling second half, but it’s not bad overall and, if you enjoyed the first book, you’ll probably like this second one as well.
Happy Doll has now embraced his absurd name and dropped the “Hank” that he went by for years, and he’s getting in Buddhism (the title is a reference to the wheel of dharma as well as a pun on the idiom the wheel of justice), so there’s a little character development going on.
It’s interesting to see a contemporary novel address the ongoing homelessness crisis that’s happening across the Western world and Ames depicts it in all its brutalism. Doll’s search for the missing woman is a real page turner and I loved that first half which had a lot of excitement and momentum.
Unfortunately once Doll finds the missing woman all momentum is lost and the rest of the story plays out in a fairly predictable fashion. It’s quite similar to how the first book went too. If he’s going to continue the series, I hope Ames finds a less repetitive way of writing his third acts - two books in and already settling into a groove isn’t a good sign.
Which isn’t to say that the second half is without any interest, but it lacks a lot of the energy and mystery that the first half had, particularly given Ames’ style of excessive description and unwillingness to jump ahead of scenes that don’t serve much purpose and don’t need to be gone through step-by-step.
The Wheel of Doll is a half-decent contemporary crime novel like the first book was. Fans of crime fiction and/or this author might get something out of it but it’s not a must-read for anyone else.
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