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The second book in the Lee Oswald series won't disappoint fans of his first adventure, Still River. In The Next Time You Die Lee "Hank" Oswald has to find a missing file that lots of folks would evidentially kill to have, keep the feisty and fetching god-daughter of a senator out of trouble, and if he has time, or doesn't get killed first, maybe just stop a third string fix-it guy for the border cartels from becoming the first string mob boss of Dallas. Just to add to the fun, he's being haunted, sort of, by the ghost of his best friend, the one he turned in for killing a cop. If Hank has a fault, it's that he doesn't know when to look the other way, but without question he fits Chandler's requirement that "...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

Harry Hunsicker's second book in this series lives up to the praise heaped on his first adventure, Still River, but living up, or down, to a reputation is something Dallas PI Lee "Hank" Oswald is already familiar with. Hank wasn't named after the famous Dallas assassin, he was given that name by a father as stubborn as only a Texan can be, and though it causes him a certain amount of grief, that's nothing compared to the heaping helping of Dallas trouble he's about to get from a new player in town who's planning on sewing up the open city. The new player, Jesus Rundell, is as tough and mean as they come, and Lee's managed to get himself directly in the path of this steam roller somehow. The somehow is that he's been hired to find a stolen file folder by an aging alcoholic Baptist minister, a file that everyone seems to want, but nobody quite knows where it is. Lee's first clue, that the preacher's assistant Carlos had it was almost right, until it turned into a very dead end.

Hank takes a lot of abuse as this case goes along. Sure he gets to sleep with a client, or the girl that the client, a wealthy senator, has hired him to protect, but he frequently finds himself on the wrong end of way too much muscle. Now, considering that he's ex-Army special forces and spent time as a Ranger unarmed combat instructor, you've got to figure that he's got a death wish or is every bit as stubborn as his old man was. One on one, or two, or maybe three, he's just fine...but when he's the center of attention for a bunch of mob types on their own home turf...like in a topless joint that's the command center for the tough nut who's out to consolidate Dallas's underworld...things can get out of control:

"...someone bit my forearm. A nipple poked me in the eye. Cameras flashed. Japanese men jabbered at one another in Japanese, my face was pressed into the dirty carpet of the bar. I tried to get up until a foot hit my solar plexus and everything shut down."

Yeah. Like that.

Like any good mystery, Hank has to go back to his roots to untangle the causes for everything going down. Back to the time when a kid named Billy Barringer was just his best friend, and not yet the ascendant son of a rural Texas mob boss. Or before Hank had had to turn Billy in for murdering a cop in cold blood. Or before Billy's had been killed escaping from prison. Back before all that.

And along for the ride is the gal that Hank's supposed to be keeping an eye on, which is in turns a pleasant occupation with painful consequences. And all too frequently stepping into the picture is Rundell, a "third string fix man for the border cartels" who's out to make something of himself, namely the crime boss of Dallas.

A series like this tends to acquire a cast of regulars, and they're quite a crew in their own right. Hank's partner in the detective agency is another good looking gal; Nolan O'Connor, formerly a profiler for the San Antonio PD. Nolan doesn't miss anything unless its about her own life, where she's got impeccably lousy taste in men. Where other women might buy ice cream to help them get over some bum, Nolan indulges herself in buying bigger and better guns. Which is where Hank's (living) best friend Olson comes in. He's a six foot six semi-psychotic homosexual, also an Iraq war buddy from 1991 who owes Hank his life, and has settled into an interesting existence as a black market arms dealer. It's a colorful crew to say the least.

As Hank pushes his way into more and more dangerous confrontations with underworld types, both in Houston and back in rural Texas where he grew up, the moment when he had to turn his best friend in comes back to haunt him with deadly consequences, as do visits from a past that won't stay dead.

If I have any complaint about Harry Hunsiker's Dallas PI, it might be that his moral compass points towards doing the right thing a bit too hard. Still, he seems to be learning. Besides that, my only beef is that we've got to wait till July for his next novel, Crosshairs.