BOBBIE FAYE'S VERY (VERY, VERY, VERY) BAD DAY
Toni McGee Causey
St. Martin's Griffin
Fiction
ISBN-10: 0312354487
ISBN-13: 9780312354480

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.

    --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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