{"id":6404,"date":"2026-05-24T04:07:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6404"},"modified":"2026-05-24T04:07:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:07:40","slug":"dirty-myrtle-by-kennedy-weible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6404","title":{"rendered":"Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some novels announce themselves with a thunderclap. Others walk in barefoot, smelling faintly of beer, drop into a kitchen chair, and start talking before you\u2019ve offered them coffee. Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible<\/em> is the second kind, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can pay a crime novel set on the Grand Strand of South Carolina.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read enough small-town crime fiction to know how easily the form can turn into a checklist (broken cop, missing woman, snitches in flannel), but this book sidesteps every clich\u00e9 by the simple trick of treating its people as people first and plot pieces second. The result is a book that\u2019s funny on Tuesday, tense on Wednesday, and a little heartbroken by Sunday.<\/p>\n

The Setup: A Long Weekend in a Town That Keeps Its Receipts<\/h3>\n

The story unfolds in the days leading up to Thanksgiving in Myrtle Beach, a town where Confederate flags hang in beachwear shop windows and Sailor Cassidy, an HVAC tech and part-time chaos agent, owns one towel and uses it for everything. Sailor has just brought home a volleyball coach named Lula whose team lost in the semis. Across town, Officer Tuscaloosa \u201cTusk\u201d Knight is finishing a night shift cluttered with public urinators when his captain hands him an off-the-books favor that will mess up his life in nine creative ways before breakfast.<\/p>\n

Sailor and Tusk haven\u2019t met yet. They will. And when they do, the collision sets off a chain reaction involving real estate fraud, a bottle of local rotgut whiskey called Dirty Myrtle, a livestream comedian, a missing bank employee, and a couple of men who do violence the way most people do laundry: badly, but often.<\/p>\n

The Plot Mechanics: Twin Engines, One Coast<\/h3>\n

What I admire most about the plotting is how Weible runs two parallel storylines and lets the reader see the seam between them long before the characters do. Sailor\u2019s family is its own tangle: her sister Carrie is silently leaving a marriage<\/a>, her brother JP is a moderately successful internet comic with a cat named Walnut and a few secrets in a cornfield, her younger brother Dex is home from college, and her parents are doing what families do, which is pretending the kitchen is louder than it really is.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Tusk is chasing a guy named Jug who once sat two rows away from him in eleventh-grade English. Jug is, in the author\u2019s lovely phrasing, the kind of trouble that arrives \u201cto sleep off a case of the stupids,\u201d and the book is generous enough to let him be more than a punchline. The kidnapping mentioned in the blurb arrives at chest level and travels downward from there, picking up speed.<\/p>\n

The Voices: A Cast That Could Carry a Bar Conversation Alone<\/h3>\n

A few of the standouts:<\/p>\n

Sailor, whose perceptiveness sneaks up on you the way her hangovers sneak up on her, half-stoned but somehow always reading the room
\nTusk, a Black officer in a Confederate-flag-towel kind of town, decent and tired and trying to make detective without losing his soul
\nCarrie, the older sister, all professional competence outside the house and quiet ruin inside it
\nJP, the comedian brother whose livestream patter is so good I\u2019d genuinely subscribe to his fictional fan club
\nMr. Papaioannou, a Greek widower with a FaceTime problem and a habit of pretend-spitting at things he disapproves of (no exaggeration, my favorite minor character of the year)
\nCaptain Lewis, who has known the Shaw family for thirty years and treats favors as a form of grief management<\/p>\n

Even the bit players get a little oxygen. A waiter who used to be a cop. A divorce attorney named Chess. A bartender at Big Lock\u2019s. None of them feel like furniture.<\/p>\n

The Prose: Talented Friend at 2 AM, Telling You a Story<\/h3>\n

Weible\u2019s sentences have a sneaky rhythm. He\u2019ll set up a banal moment and then drop a metaphor that knocks you sideways. A hangover is \u201ca small miner \u2026 chiseling away rhythmically at the inside of her skull.\u201d Sailor\u2019s neglected bangs become \u201cvisual impairments.\u201d Carrie\u2019s anger climbs the dial \u201cpast Stun, past Kill, directly to Eviscerate.\u201d This is comic writing of a high order: specific, kinetic, never showy.<\/p>\n

What surprised me most about Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible<\/em> is how warm the book is underneath the wisecracks. Affairs are handled without judgment. A grandmother\u2019s grief over a wayward grandson lands with the unforced weight of someone who has actually known a grandmother. Even the lousy whiskey that gives the novel its title gets a small soliloquy of affection. The book likes its people, and that warmth is the engine that keeps the comedy from going sour and the crime from going lurid.<\/p>\n

Strengths, Briefly Inventoried<\/h3>\n

For readers who like their highlights in list form:<\/p>\n

Dialogue that earns laughs without strain, the kind you read aloud to whoever\u2019s nearby
\nA multi-POV structure that never gets confusing thanks to distinct voices
\nSetting work so sharp Myrtle Beach itself behaves like a character, all sugar drinks and stately old houses standing next to new builds that look \u201clike they were built with fondant\u201d
\nCrime mechanics that respect the reader\u2019s intelligence
\nAn emotional undertow that earns the final pages without sentimentality
\nFemale protagonists written with rare specificity (Sailor and Carrie do not feel like sisters of convenience; they feel like actual sisters)<\/p>\n

Where Dirty Myrtle Sits on the Shelf<\/h3>\n

This is Weible\u2019s third novel, after Number One Loser<\/em> and Prophet of Loss<\/em>. He\u2019s also published a story collection (How You\u2019re Not Funny<\/em>), a children\u2019s book (Bed Critters<\/em>), short fiction in Iron Horse Literary Review<\/em> and Hanging Loose Magazine<\/em>, and humor essays in Men\u2019s Health<\/em> and McSweeney\u2019s Internet Tendency<\/em>. That r\u00e9sum\u00e9 reads on the page. The man knows how to land a joke, build a sentence, and trust a reader to keep up.<\/p>\n

Genre-wise, Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible<\/em> lives at the four-way intersection of comic crime, Southern fiction, literary character study, and beachfront noir. Apprentice House Press, the student-staffed publisher out of Loyola University Maryland, has done right by this manuscript.<\/p>\n

Read-Alikes for the Convinced<\/h3>\n

If you finish Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible<\/em> and want more of the same general shape, try:<\/p>\n

Tourist Season<\/em> or Skinny Dip<\/em> by Carl Hiaasen, for sunny-state crime comedy
\nGet Shorty<\/em> or Out of Sight<\/em> by Elmore Leonard, for dialogue that struts
\nRazorblade Tears<\/em> by S. A. Cosby, for Southern crime with serious feeling
\nThe Friends of Eddie Coyle<\/em> by George V. Higgins, for low-level criminals doing low-level damage
\nThe Devil All the Time<\/em> by Donald Ray Pollock, for darker rural Southern crime
\nFlorida<\/em> by Lauren Groff, for short-form sister-state vibes that share DNA<\/p>\n

Final Word<\/h3>\n

I picked up Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible<\/em> expecting beach noir<\/a>. I finished it feeling like I\u2019d spent a long weekend with a family I\u2019d want to invite to my own holiday table, even if half of them would steal my towels. That\u2019s a rare trick for a crime novel, and a very rare one for any book to pull off in three hundred pages. Pour yourself a finger of whatever\u2019s nearest. Settle in.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some novels announce themselves with a thunderclap. Others walk in barefoot, smelling faintly of beer, drop into a kitchen chair, and start talking before you\u2019ve offered them coffee. Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible is the second kind, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can pay a crime novel set on the Grand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6404"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}