America is fucked, if we are to believe in its fiction. There is humanity, and you can still find love in the dirty old heart of the city, even if the arteries are clogged with sex and money, and it's still haemorrhaging crime. If we're looking for truth in the stories that people make up, we hardly need look to where everything in the garden comes up roses, not in a country where everyone seemingly has an automatic weapon under the bed. Everything is criminal, and funny, if we believe the wealth of crime writers clambering over each other to get to the shelves. Take the sad and sorry tale of Mingo 'No-Bird' Gideon under advisement.

Fish and booze didn't mix for the Baggett County gambler. He took a dive off of his boat out on the lake late one night, lingering just long enough in this world to take out a half-million dollar life policy. No one was gutted, least of all his business partner Rex Echols, bar owner and wannabe country singer. Rex, you see, held Mingo's policy and after the formalities are through stands to make enough off the back of his friend's death to finance his dream recording studio: Echolsound.

Cue Jack Flippo, private dick and erstwhile lawyer, contracted by Cactus Bloodworth to tidy up the loose ends before Centurion Securities will pay out; $500,000 is a lot of somebody else's money. All Jack wants to know are a few simple answers: why there was only one photo of the bloater; why there was no autopsy; why the only other witness has gone AWOL; and why Mingo 'No-Bird' Gideon was in the oven before he was even dry.

Swanson, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, won the CWA John Creasey Award for Best First Crime Novel for Flippo's debut, the sparky Big Town. They compared that, not unreasonably, to 'Dutch' Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, Swanson doing the same for Dallas and its surrounds as that pair manage for Florida and Miami.

This new one is rattling stuff, troubled less by plot (hands up if you don't spot the end before Swanson's even off the blocks) than the gallery of grotesques that throng these mean pages: Loyce Slapp, Baggett County's corrupt and licentious law-man in cahoots with Rex Echols; the pneumatic April Showers and her intriguingly tattooed breasts; Tony Angel, a man with a videocamera, a mission, and no ponytail; or indeed Rex himself and his hideously authentic sounding songs: "Let's go for a spin in my Coup De Ville/'Cause babe, I'm a fellow with couth to kill".

How real any of this is may not be for us to say, but to compare this to, say, Dennis Lehane's recent stab at contemporary hard-boiled A Drink Before The War is to see the stark difference between science and alchemy. Lehane's smart mouth is agonising; Swanson's could talk you into an early coffin and get you paying for the privilege. Dreamboat is shirt, punchy and about as charming as rattlesnake.