I
recently attended a panel discussion of authors in which one of
those in attendance indicated that he didn't think of BOBBIE FAYE'S
VERY (VERY, VERY, VERY) BAD DAY, Toni McGee Causey's debut novel,
as a thriller. Fair enough. But I beg to differ, and mightily.
Everything in this impressive work screams thriller. You have your
explosions. You have your karate. You have your sex --- chaste,
yes, but some of the descriptions of Bobbie Faye Sumrall, the
erstwhile heroine of the piece, are difficult to get out of your
mind. Thriller? Yes. Nonstop action, mystery and suspense. And
laughs as well.


Anyone who has ever awakened to find that their day has started
without them and already rolled behind the eight-ball will identify
with Bobbie Faye, whose morning begins with a household crisis of
mini-biblical proportions and flows downhill from there. On what
should be the best day of her year --- when she reigns as queen of
the Lake Charles, Louisiana Contraband Days Festival --- Bobbie
Faye has to deal with the kidnapping of Roy, her no-good,
waste-of-skin brother, the theft of her tiara (which is the only
thing she inherited from her mother) and a police manhunt of which
she is the subject. All Bobbie Faye has to do is recover her tiara,
give it to her brother's kidnappers as ransom, keep what is left of
her trailer from being ransacked, hold Children's Services at bay
so they don't abscond with her niece, and reign supreme as festival
queen.


How is Bobbie Faye going to do it? Easy. She kidnaps a guy in a
bank parking lot. And her luck may be running true to form. Trevor,
her "victim," is just a little too worldly, knows a bit too much
about guns, helicopters and lock-picking, and is really good
looking. The fact that one of the policemen in hot pursuit of
Bobbie Faye is one of her (many) ex-boyfriends doesn't help matters
either. Well, actually, in some ways it does. And Bobbie Faye, a
one-woman Cajun wrecking crew, needs all the help she can get. It's
not that she's hard to find --- just follow the smoke --- but the
problem is what to do with her. By the end of the day, she has the
police, FBI and a couple of sets of bad guys after her, and we're
not sure where Trevor fits into it all. It really doesn't make any
difference; Bobbie Faye has them all outnumbered.


There are many things to love about this book --- the plot, the
pacing, the dialogue --- but my own favorite element is the
characterization. Go to Louisiana, travel east on I-10, past Baton
Rouge, and head south. Stop into a grocery store, buy a bag of
cracklins' and an ounce of head cheese, and walk around a bit.
You'll eventually bump into everyone you read about in BOBBIE
FAYE'S VERY (VERY, VERY, VERY) BAD DAY. And I have a feeling that
(almost) all the characters will be back. But if you want a short
description of this great novel, think Die Hard in the
swamp. And Bobbie Faye? She's a titanium magnolia.