Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza

Published by ‎G.P. Putnam's Sons on June 22, 2021

A mentally challenged member of the Samsal family is murdered while working at one of the gas stations that his family owns. The first two West Windsor Township officers on the scene are Niket Patel and Michelle Wu. Michelle is the mayor’s daughter. Both are rookies and not well trained. As they wonder what to do, Andrea Stern drives into the gas station with a van full of screaming children. As the cops try to tell her that the gas station is a crime scene, Andrea’s daughter contaminates the scene with a stream of pee. Having solved her immediate problem, Andrea returns her daughter to the van and drives away, but only after lecturing the cops about their failure to follow basic procedures to secure the crime scene. She also takes note of clues to which the local cops are oblivious.

Before she became a baby factory, Andrea was on track to be an FBI profiler. She had spent her childhood solving petty crimes committed at school. Unraveling mysteries is the work she felt destined to do. She married a man named Jeff who seemed on track to be a millionaire in his twenties. After an initial success with the FBI that earned favorable publicity, Andrea had four children (with a fifth on the way). Her husband committed crimes of his own, squandering their assets. Now Andrea feels stuck in a life that is the polar opposite of the life she had expected. The chance to solve the gas station murder gives her the lift that she needs.

The plot of this amusing novel demands that Andrea solve the crime, but her investigatory efforts are hampered by her need to keep track of four kids. She’s assisted in her investigation (and sometimes with childcare) by Kenny Lee, an investigative reporter who hopes to restore a career he trashed by fabricating the facts of a news story, and by a collection of suburban moms who call themselves the Cellulitists. Andrea knows that the Samsal kid wasn’t killed in a robbery and wasn’t (despite police-planted rumors) a drug dealer killed by Trenton gang members. She also finds it curious that the Samsal family was denied a permit to dig a hole for a swimming pool, reflecting a suspicious pattern of pool permit denials that have occurred since the township began to expand.

Suburban Dicks is a funny, fast-moving story. Apart from an FBI agent who gives a British caution rather than an American Miranda warning, the story is credible. The plot involves police corruption, a second murder that occurred decades earlier, the history of suburban and small-town bigotry against blacks, and the township’s institutional prejudice against residents with roots in Asia and India. Fabian Nicieza doesn’t lecture readers about America’s issues with race, but he doesn’t pretend that the suburbs are free from racial tension, notwithstanding the suburban attitude that big cities are the source of all crime.

Nicieza gives the characters believable personalities. Conflicts between the mayor and her daughter, between the mayor and her police chief, and between members of the dynasty that has long controlled the police department add to the plot, as does Kenny's willingness to use his friendship with the police chief's son to advance his investigation. Andrea is a fun protagonist. She makes no effort to be a supermom, doesn’t get along with the husband who keeps making her pregnant, but perseveres because children eventually grow up, pregnancies only last nine months, and husbands can always be divorced. In the meantime, there’s a mystery to solve, and it is the mystery that gives her life a rediscovered meaning. I hope Nicieza treats readers to more adventures of his antiheroic mommy. She’s a hoot.

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