Rag Man, by Pete Hautman

A month after we bought a house from Pete Hautman in South Minneapolis, he slyly asked “Have you found the secret door yet?” and we’ve been looking ever since. This town’s most deserving and least celebrated mystery novelist recently published his eighth novel (three of them are “young adult titles”), a terrific little number called Rag Man, part genre detective story and part unpredictable, noirish thriller. Not unlike the cinema of the Coen brothers. Lookit: Hautman went to school in St. Louis Park with Joel and Ethan, where there must have been something in the water. (Diehard film geeks will recall that Frances McDormand’s husband in Fargo was a wildlife painter obsessed with beating “the Hautmans” in a wildlife stamp-art competition. Pete’s two brothers are, in fact, very successful wildlife painters who frequently win these competitions.) This book has been out for a little while, but go and buy it dammit, along with anything else by Hautman, a darkly comic writer who deserves to be at least as rich as Gary Keillor by now.