Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza: Murder Where the Suburbs Meet Utopia

I spent a month on this so it ended up fairly coherent. If I’d posted this sooner, it’d liable to be inarticulate blather. I wanted this post to be better than it is, but I think the point gets through.

Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza Hardcover, 386 pg. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021 Read: September 8-9, 2021 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

Satkunananthan Sasmal would have been the first to admit he’d had worse nights working the midnight shift at his uncle’s Valero station. For example…there was the old lady who fell asleep while driving and plowed into the first island. Satkunananthan barely hit the kill switch on pump three before diving out of the car’s path. The woman rolled down her window and asked him to fill her tank. Regular. Cash.

Then there was that time he had been robbed at gunpoint.

And the other time he had been robbed at knifepoint.

And the other time he had been robbed at spatula-point.

In his defense, it had been one of those long-handled metal barbecue spatulas.

And there was last night, when Satkunananthan Sasmal was murdered.

What’s Suburban Dicks About?

It’s about the murder of poor Satkunananthan Sasmal, to put it succinctly. The very outclassed police department of the small New Jersey city he’s from isn’t up to investigating it properly, and they take a lazy and facile answer for the crime.

This is where a couple of unlikely amateur sleuths come in. The first is Kenneth Lee, when he was a little younger, he rocketed to fame thanks to his reporting. When he was a little older, he was famously disgraced thanks to bad reporting.. Now he’s struggling to make ends meet and working for the small-timiest paper you can imagine.

The other unlikely sleuth is a mother of 4 (with one on the way) who was headed for a career as an FBI profiler hunting killers. She arrives (accidentally) on the crime scene before the police get a chance to secure the scene and notices about it than the professionals. Being there, seeing the Satkunananthan’s body, and drawing some important conclusions hooks Andrea Stern. She teams up with Lee to do the work the police are clearly not going to.

Between the two of them and some even unlikelier help that Andrea recruits, the two find themselves going down unexpected avenues of investigation, discovering secrets that few can believe, and bringing a variety of injustices to light.

Andrea Stern

In what seemed like painfully slow motion, a woman slid out through the open door as if the minivan was oozing an egg yolk. Her legs popped out first, short and stubby, then she slid her body down and out of the seat. As much bowling ball as human, she wiggled her feet until they touched the ground.

She was short, five foot threeish, with an unkempt hive of thick, curly dark hair. Her brown eyes were huge, and—Michelle had no other word for it—feral. She waddled as much as walked. She was more pregnant than any woman Michelle had ever seen in her life, and quite possibly more pregnant than any woman had ever been in the history of human civilization. If Michelle had to guess, she would have estimated the woman was about to give birth to a college sophomore.

If Andrea Stern isn’t my favorite new character this year, she’s going to be in the top 3. She made the choice to abandon her dreams of working for the FBI, of following her gifts and interests in order to be a mom. She didn’t realize how often she’d be a mother, but that’s beside the point.

Sure, she’s been wondering what might have been practically every day since then (actually, she’s pretty sure what might have been). So when she has the opportunity to investigate a murder—she grabs it and won’t let go. No matter what problems it causes her family.

She is smart, she’s funny, she’s tenacious, she gives a new meaning to resourceful, and she deserves a husband that treats her better.

She’s not perfect—it’s hard not to question a lot of her parenting choices. But I think she’d seem better were she not “more pregnant than any woman” in history and trying to recapture the years lost.

Kenneth Lee

She stared at him for several seconds, then said, “You’re not doing it ‘cause you’re a good person.”

“No, I absolutely am not,” he freely admitted. “But good will come of it. I promise you that.”

Nicieza had every opportunity to rehabilitate Lee, to make him sympathetic—even to tell a redemption story of sorts. But no, he leaves Lee pretty much where we found him—as someone who tasted the limelight and would do just about anything to get back to it.

This doesn’t mean he’s bad at his job, though. He was a solid partner in the investigation, just with less-than-honorable motives.

So, what did I think about Suburban Dicks?

I was having so much fun reading this that I was on page 200 before I noticed that I hadn’t taken a single note. So I forced myself to write down a couple of things so I could write this post. And then by page 220, I stopped taking notes again until I was finished. I was probably grinning throughout. Nicieza delivered something smack-dab in the middle of the sweet-spot for my taste.

This felt like the third or fourth book in the Andrea Stern series—starting when she was in High School (or maybe before) and then taking a break after college and picking up here. Like Veronica Mars, making this the Hulu series—just a little more successful. Andrea and her world—her family, too—felt well-established, a character that Nicieza had spent years perfecting.

That’s not all that was perfect—the book was a perfect balance of comedy, social commentary, and murder mystery. I’m not sure which aspect I appreciated most, either. Consider it a three-way tie, I guess.

It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if Lee wasn’t around in any sequel (oh, please let there by a sequel!), but I’d certainly hope to see just about everyone else—mostly characters I haven’t talked about because I want to keep this thing under 15,000 words. But the supporting characters are a great mix of cultures, economic class, and personalities—the kind you want to read about again and again.

I’m not sure what else to say—from the great opening (quoted at the beginning of this post) to a perfect last line, this is going to be one of my favorites of the year and I’m willing to bet you’ll agree if you give it a chance.

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