I'm rounding up somewhat severely because I don't want to be, well, a dick, but there is one likeable character here and she's so thoroughly trapped in a genuinely tragic situation that the whole thing just reads as a sad, sad waste.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advance copy in exchange for honest feedback.

Decided to DNF this one. It wasn’t grabbing my attention and with so many thriller-style reads in the world, I needed more from it to make it worth my time.

My favorite book this year. Smart and fast paced with well-edited writing and a cast of likable characters. I'm desperate for a series!

Suburban Dicks is a superbly grimly acerbically funny mystery by Fabian Nicieza. Released 22nd June 2021 by Penguin Random House on their G.P. Putnam's Sons imprint, it's 400 pages and is available in hardcover, paperback, audio, and ebook formats.

A lot of people whose jobs rely on the written word wrongly consider crime fiction, well, low hanging fruit. It's not quite quite they say, it's often outrè, badly written (they say), well, this author would beg to differ. This is a genuinely funny and sharply wry procedural with a complex plot and an genuinely nuanced and satisfying denouement and resolution. Sometimes the humor reminded me faintly of Ben Aaronovitch or Fowler's Bryant & May books with a subtle complexity reminiscent of the more cerebral and classic Americans like Stout and Woolrich.

The word that keeps popping up in my head is clever. This is a cleverly constructed puzzle. The main character is hysterically deadpan-funny but also really really clever. She's head-and-shoulders smarter than most of the rest of the people in the room, whatever room she's in at the moment, but she's not above making slyly sarcastic cracks which often fly above the heads of the people she's talking to. She teases apart the hidden motives and solution to the crimes and does it between shuttling her kids to soccer practice, homework, and being heavily pregnant.

This is a standalone, but I sincerely hope it's the first in a long long series. Four and a half stars. I highly recommend it to folks who enjoy a bit of snark with their murder mysteries.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

For whatever reason, this novel did not grab my attention. I have found that reading during the pandemic has been hit or miss, with focus a continual challenge, so that fault my lie with that and not the novel itself. I may try to re-read this at a later time to see if it was simply my mood at the time.

A recent shooting at a gas station turns out to be linked to an old crime. The suburban New Jerseylocale is home to residents of multiple ethnicities that do not always get along as well as it appears on the surface. Andrea Stern is the hugely pregnant mother of 4 who stumbles on to the new crime scene. At one time she had hoped to become a criminal profiler, but that career was derailed when she became pregnant and decided to marry Jeff, the father of her child. Andrea is compelled to find the shooter and she is joined in her investigation by Kenneth Lee, a prize winning reporter who is now scraping by in the lowest rung of journalism, after having falsified a story.

The plot of this book wasn’t bad and if it had been written by someone else, someone who didn’t try to turn the horrific linked crimes into a cosy domestic comedy, I might have enjoyed this book more. As it is, I didn’t find anything even slightly amusing about the book. I didn’t understand why Andrea, who hated both Jeff and parenting, would have decided to spend her entire life pregnant. We are constantly being told how intelligent she is, but she sure doesn’t act like it. She drags her children along as she investigates murderers, and has the nerve to get snippy with Jeff when he objects to this. Frankly, I sided with Jeff (even though he was a crook). And then there was the brigade of housewives running around like the Scooby-Doo crowd doing surveillance on the suspects. The author even mentions Scooby-Doo, so he knew exactly what he was doing, and liked it. I also wasn’t crazy about Kenneth who was both pushy and snotty. I would not be interested in a sequel.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Okay, so I did originally pick this up because of the author being a Deadpool co-creator. Not my usual genre, but I did very much enjoy this and it definitely kept me turning the pages. I do hope Ryan Reynolds promoted it to all his followers and I anxiously await the movie.

I really enjoyed this book a lot. It has been a while since I have finished a novel, as opposed to a comic/graphic novel or an audiobook, and the content of this one has me dying to read again. The story was absolutely fantastic and had me on the edge of my seat until the very end. The characters were so great and I actually found myself chuckling quite a bit more than I expected to. I would love to see this adapted into a show and think that it would be fantastic and perfect for what so many people are interested in watching these days.

Andrea Stern was once a respected FBI profiler, but she gave it up to be a stay-at-home mom to her four children (with a fifth very much on the way). She now lives in the suburbs (West Windsor, New Jersey) with her children and husband (a convicted white-collar criminal).

When one of Andrea's very young children is desperate for a bathroom while driving home, Andrea pulls her car into a service station and tries to hurry her daughter to the bathroom when they are stopped by two patrol-officers who are starting to tape off a crime scene at the location. Just as the officers inform Andrea that she and her daughter need to leave, the little girl pees all over the area, contaminating the crime scene. And so begins Andrea's involvement in a homicide in her own community.

Andrea finds she's missed using her skills and she's serious about the murder of the young man at the service station mart. With the help of a journalist friend, Kenny Lee, who's badly in need of a good story to help get his good reputation back, Andrea investigates the homicide ... which she notes does NOT have the signs of a random or gang murder as the police try to frame it. Which can only mean the police themselves are either extremely incompetent or covering up something. But what?

This book was a really delightful read. I got so involved with the characters and the story that I was looking forward each day to getting back into the book. I was out of town for a long weekend and throughout the three days I was away I was constantly thinking of the book and where it might be heading.

The writing is delicious (I didn't realize it at the time, but author Fabian Nicieza is the creative force behind Deadpool) and there is more than a fair amount of humor, and yet I never felt that the story was sacrificed for the humor. It flowed naturally and easily.

The story unfolds appropriately so we keep thinking we know what might come next but are often wrong. Or, if we're correct, the surprise will be in how the matter is resolved.

The story is pretty quick and there are not many red herrings, but there are a few surprises here and there.

The characters and their relationships are what makes this book really shine and you can count me as someone highly interested in reading more Andrea Stern mysteries. This also would make a very good tv series.

Looking for a good book? If you like mysteries Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza should be on your reading list. If you aren't a fan of mysteries, this is a great entry to the genre.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

The blurb is correct - if you are a fan of Deadpool, this one is for you! I love the Deadpool movies, but the male humor was a little strong in this one. I rarely pick up books for humor, but was pleasantly surprised by this one. I feel like I found myself going to my husband to read passages out loud more than I should have, thinking he would enjoy it more than I was. Nonetheless, I'm glad I had the opportunity to read it! I'm not sure I would do so again, or pick up a book like it.

I wanted to love this because I enjoy the Deadpool humor but I don't think it translates well to a book. Andie especially came off as cold and totally uncaring about her many kids and didn't seem to give a crap about her marriage either. I didn't really care to finish the story because I didn't connect with these characters at all.

Kenny Lee was relegated to writing for a small town newspaper after a huge public scandal. He’d been looking for a new story, something big, something that could propel him out of West Windsor, New Jersey ever since. He didn’t think that the shooting of the young man who worked at the gas station would be that thing.

Andrea Stern didn’t think she’d be stumbling into a crime scene, but when one of her four children desperately needed a bathroom, she stopped at the closest gas station. It wasn’t until after she’d parked and grabbed her daughter that she noticed the police standing around and the man with the bullet that had gone through his head. Too stunned to move, she continued to hold her daughter while the girl peed on the unsecured murder scene.

Before Andrea had left college to get married and start having babies (she was currently 7 months pregnant with their fifth), she had been well on her way to becoming on the FBI’s best profilers. She’d already helped them catch a serial killer. And a quick glance around that gas station parking lot told her enough about what had happened that night.

At the police press conference later, they announced that the killing had probably been from a robbery. When Kenny talked to his cop friend, he’d been told that the man had been into drugs. Both Kenny and Andrea knew that the police were lying. What they didn’t know was why. But when Andie starts to put it together, she knows she’ll need Kenny’s help to get all the evidence together.

The gas station attendant is part of the Indian community that has been growing in West Windsor. Is it possible that the murder was racially motivated? Or is there something else going on, something the police don’t want their community to know? As Kenny and Andrea ask questions and dig through old paperwork, they realize that this latest killing is just a distraction from the real crime, the one that town officials have been hiding for decades.

Suburban Dicks is the debut novel from the cocreator of Deadpool. Author Fabian Nicieza has put together two unlikely but never boring amateur detectives to dig for the answers in this fun mystery that is bristling with personality, sarcasm, children, and intelligence. Filled with surprises and twists, challenging family relationships and self-actualization, and too many doughnuts (I so want doughnuts right now!), Suburban Dicks takes the modern mystery novel and turns it on its head, taking us to a whole new level.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this one. When you hear that the author is the cocreator of something as crazy funny as Deadpool, you have to know that the story could go in just about any direction. So I was pleasantly surprise to find a fairly typical crime that just happens to be exposed by two unusual citizens. Kenny is interesting, but Andrea steals just about every scene she’s in, and I have all my fingers crossed for more novels with these two. I think Andie is exactly the crime fighter we need these days, and I am here for any novel that features her and her fascinating mind.

Egalleys for Suburban Dicks were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.

When the story starts out with a kid pissing on a crime scene, you know you're in for a wild ride. And that is exactly what you get from Fabian Nicieza, co-creator of 'Deadpool.'
Andie Stern, former profiler and mother of four (and uncomfortably pregnant with number 5), teams up with Kenneth Lee, disgraced journalist, to solve the murder of a gas station attendant. But what they stumble upon is something bigger than they thought possible in their hometown.
Part spit-take funny, part thought-provoking, #SuburbanDicks is a glorious romp through who-done-it land.

This is a breezy, funny mystery that has some characters to really root for. I liked the way Andrea and Kenny worked together, but still had their own individual motivations and so weren’t quite a classic partner duo. The quirkiness, for me, was balanced out by the real investigative chops demonstrated by both Andrea and Kenny, and by the seriousness of the stacking crimes they uncover and the light those crimes shine on historical and continued racism in a small town. Nicieza is a co-creator of Marvel’s Deadpool character, and the humor here will be familiar to anyone who has read those comics (or seen the movie), I think – which is to say, everyone gets a turn being roasted.

Published by ‎G.P. Putnam's Sons on June 22, 2021

A mentally challenged member of the Samsal family is murdered while working at one of the gas stations that his family owns. The first two West Windsor Township officers on the scene are Niket Patel and Michelle Wu. Michelle is the mayor’s daughter. Both are rookies and not well trained. As they wonder what to do, Andrea Stern drives into the gas station with a van full of screaming children. As the cops try to tell her that the gas station is a crime scene, Andrea’s daughter contaminates the scene with a stream of pee. Having solved her immediate problem, Andrea returns her daughter to the van and drives away, but only after lecturing the cops about their failure to follow basic procedures to secure the crime scene. She also takes note of clues to which the local cops are oblivious.

Before she became a baby factory, Andrea was on track to be an FBI profiler. She had spent her childhood solving petty crimes committed at school. Unraveling mysteries is the work she felt destined to do. She married a man named Jeff who seemed on track to be a millionaire in his twenties. After an initial success with the FBI that earned favorable publicity, Andrea had four children (with a fifth on the way). Her husband committed crimes of his own, squandering their assets. Now Andrea feels stuck in a life that is the polar opposite of the life she had expected. The chance to solve the gas station murder gives her the lift that she needs.

The plot of this amusing novel demands that Andrea solve the crime, but her investigatory efforts are hampered by her need to keep track of four kids. She’s assisted in her investigation (and sometimes with childcare) by Kenny Lee, an investigative reporter who hopes to restore a career he trashed by fabricating the facts of a news story, and by a collection of suburban moms who call themselves the Cellulitists. Andrea knows that the Samsal kid wasn’t killed in a robbery and wasn’t (despite police-planted rumors) a drug dealer killed by Trenton gang members. She also finds it curious that the Samsal family was denied a permit to dig a hole for a swimming pool, reflecting a suspicious pattern of pool permit denials that have occurred since the township began to expand.

Suburban Dicks is a funny, fast-moving story. Apart from an FBI agent who gives a British caution rather than an American Miranda warning, the story is credible. The plot involves police corruption, a second murder that occurred decades earlier, the history of suburban and small-town bigotry against blacks, and the township’s institutional prejudice against residents with roots in Asia and India. Fabian Nicieza doesn’t lecture readers about America’s issues with race, but he doesn’t pretend that the suburbs are free from racial tension, notwithstanding the suburban attitude that big cities are the source of all crime.

Nicieza gives the characters believable personalities. Conflicts between the mayor and her daughter, between the mayor and her police chief, and between members of the dynasty that has long controlled the police department add to the plot, as does Kenny's willingness to use his friendship with the police chief's son to advance his investigation. Andrea is a fun protagonist. She makes no effort to be a supermom, doesn’t get along with the husband who keeps making her pregnant, but perseveres because children eventually grow up, pregnancies only last nine months, and husbands can always be divorced. In the meantime, there’s a mystery to solve, and it is the mystery that gives her life a rediscovered meaning. I hope Nicieza treats readers to more adventures of his antiheroic mommy. She’s a hoot.

RECOMMENDED

I enjoyed ‘Suburban Dicks,” especially the main characters, Andrea and Kenny, normal and flawed people trying to live their lives while investigating a crime. They unearth a mystery that exposes systemic racism in their community. I found this funny at times, messy, and easy to read despite the heavy content.

**I received an electronic ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review of this book.

I love a good mystery, and this title ranks up there with one of my favorites. What sets this title apart from others is it's incredible dark humor intertwined with a real portrayal of deep issues such as racism. The characters are interesting and far from cookie cutter. Nicieza's writing is right on point. I found myself laughing out loud through out the book, totally absorbed in the snark, sarcasm and banter. The book is incredibly well paced. The reveals seem to happen at just the right time to keep me interested while pushing me forward in the plot. What a great time!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review Suburban Dicks by Fabian Niceza.

Suburban Dicks opens with a scene that had me laughing out loud. It immediately sucked me in with one of the best and most colorful detectives I’ve come across. Andie Stern is observant and insightful. She is also carting around four kids and is incredibly pregnant with a fifth. Stumbling onto a crime scene at a gas station where the murdered body of young Satkunananthan Sasmal lies on the ground, the fire that had once made Andie an up-and-coming FBI profiler is rekindled. She ends up bumping into a disgraced local journalist Kenny Lee, who is pursuing the story and smells an opportunity to restore some of the reputation he once had.

Fabian Nicieza, cocreator of Deadpool, has written a story of suburban New Jersey life complete with humor, real character depth and an intriguing mystery. The baffling murder leads to the discovery of body parts around town and a long-concealed conspiracy. I was equal parts amused and amazed at Nicieza’s depiction of life in the suburbs and his insightful social commentary. Along with the humor, he creates characters with real depth. They are complicated, imperfect and often filled with regret. No character stands out more than Andie Stern, who I hope to see again.

Suburban Dicks is a great book with a fascinating mystery and a lot of humor. Mystery fans are going to love this!

I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher.

Suburban Dicks takes place in the suburban town of West Windsor, New Jersey. It begins with the discovery of a murdered gas station attendant named Satkunananthan Sasmal, whose Uncle, Tharani Sasmal, owns a number of gas stations in the area. The family is part of a large, and growing, Indian and Asian immigrant community that’s moved to the area, where housing developments and McMansions have displaced the dairies and vegetable farms that were there just a few decades earlier.
From there, the snark never stops as the author takes aim at everything and everyone many of our woke brethren find objectionable about the society whose largess they have enjoyed, albeit with no investment in the country from which such gifts are withdrawn. To sum it up in a few words: great plot with too many clichéd characters.
Our advice, save your money. Better books are in the pipeline and coming soon.