American by Day

American by Day: a Novel / Derek B. Miller, 338 p.

I enjoyed Miller's The Girl in Green and was delighted by Norwegian by Night, of which American by Day is a sort of spin-off, but not a sequel.

Oslo police captain Sigrid Odegard travels to upstate New York in search of her brother, an adjunct professor and sometime-drifter.  He's gone missing in the wake of the death (by murder? suicide?) of his lover Lydia.  On arrival Sigrid meets Sheriff Irv Wylie, master of divinity from Loyola, wisecracker in chief and a thinking person's lawman.  Together and separately they confront a tangled case involving Lydia's murdered nephew, a twelve-year-old black boy whose story is almost plagiarized from that of Tamir Rice.

Miller's bio is vague but hints at a former career in State, Defense, or, my guess, Intelligence, and he has an acute sense, on display in all three of his novels, of the way America looks when viewed from the outside.  Generally he puts his perspective to sensitive and dryly humorous effect.  I loved Sheriff Irv's banter, witty but not mean, and Miller writes intelligently about race.  Smart entertainment.