John Dufrense

No Regrets, Coyote (W.W. Norton)

No Regrets, Coyote, the latest offering from acclaimed novelist John Dufresne, is a crime story, but Wylie “Coyote” Melville is no detective. A therapist by trade, the highly observant and analytical Wylie becomes a volunteer forensic consultant late one Christmas Eve when he receives a phone call from his friend Detective Sergeant Carlos O’Brien of the Eden Police Department, requesting his immediate assistance on a fresh homicide case. Wylie has an innate ability to take in a scene and provide it with narrative structure—Carlos calls him a mind reader, but that’s not exactly right. “I read faces and furniture,” Wylie explains. “I can look at a person, at his expressions, his gestures, his clothing, his home, and his possessions, and tell you what he thinks, if not always what he’s thinking.”

Wylie arrives at the scene of the crime, the Halliday home, to discover that all five members of the Halliday family have been brutally killed. Krysia Halliday is found on the kitchen floor with her head against the open oven door, apparently shot while baking cookies; her three pajama-clad children lie in the den amid a pile of partially opened Christmas gifts, each with a blindfold over the eyes and a bullet hole in the forehead; and the patriarch, restaurateur Chafin Halliday, his face nearly blown apart, is slumped nearby, not far from the murder weapon. A typed suicide note alluding to unnamed failures rests ominously on the kitchen table. The cops have it pegged as a murder-suicide at the hands of a desperate Chafin, but that explanation doesn’t quite add up for Wylie. Who types a signature on a suicide note? Why wrap expensive Christmas gifts for a family you’re about to dispatch? And why are there so few family photographs in the Halliday household?

In this smart and utterly absorbing thriller, Dufresne masterfully introduces a host of quirky, realistic, three-dimensional characters. The effect is a carefully crafted character study of Wylie himself, as we get to know his motivations, his thought processes, and his limitations. No Regrets, Coyote is a dazzlingly intricate mystery that elevates the genre with its pointed insights into the workings of the human mind.

Praise for No Regrets, Coyote:

“No Regrets, Coyote is a very cool ride. If Raymond Chandler was reincarnated as a novelist in South Florida, he couldn’t nail it any better than John Dufresne.” —Carl Hiaasen

“No Regrets, Coyote is a novel so good you want to throw a party for it. It’s tense, unnerving, fearless, and funny as hell. Beautifully rendered on every page, it may be a crime novel in name but it’s literature for the ages.” —Dennis Lehane

“If anyone has a vision of the world as compellingly particular and compassionate as John Dufresne’s, I don't know who. No Regrets, Coyote takes noir fiction and slivers it with shards of humor, ironic insight, and an almost hallucinogenic specificity. This is lean and honest storytelling that is as moving as it is engaging. Read this book. Believe me, you’ll have no regrets!” —Andre Dubus III

“Genuinely funny, genuinely suspenseful crime novels are rare, but No Regrets, Coyote succeeds on both counts. John Dufresne’s hilariously dark vision of South Florida brings to mind the work of such masters as Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard. It’s a lurid pleasure from beginning to end.” —Tom Perrotta

“Get ready to read this one twice, people—once to see what happens, and again to savor the sentences. Here, American treasure John Dufresne has written a noir, but instead of playing by the rules of noir, he makes noir play by the Rules of Dufresne. And we are the beneficiaries. So sit back, put a cooler of beer by your chair, and settle in, you’ll be here awhile:No Regrets, Coyote is impossible to close.” —Tom Franklin

“John Dufresne has turned his considerable artistic gifts to the crime novel, and the result, No Regrets, Coyote, is touching, nervy, richly detailed, and populated with a cast of characters who are utterly unique and terrifyingly real. Its humor is abundant and warm-hearted, and its detective hero is unlike any we’ve ever met before. American crime fiction has just gotten a lot more interesting.” —James W. Hall

“The ordinary crime novel narrows as it goes, the possibilities limited by deductive reasoning. But John Dufresne’s No Regrets, Coyote is an extraordinary novel, expanding until anything seems possible and everyone connects. Steeped in place, wholly original, it is, line by line, one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.” —Laura Lippman

John Dufresne is the author of seven books, including New York Times Notable Books Love Warps the Mind a Little andLouisiana Power & Light. He lives in Dania Beach and teaches creative writing at Florida International University.