Where the Bones Lie by Nick Kolakowski
Publication Date: March 11, 2025 | Datura Books | 400 pages
Nick Kolakowski really gets around, genre-wise. Although he has plenty of crime capers under his belt, with books like Payback is Forever and his Love & Bullets series, it’s his few - and excellent - horror novellas that I first became acquainted with his work, specifically Absolute Unit and, later, Beach Bodies. And let’s not forget his awesome Friday the 13th X Groundhog Day riff, appropriately titled “Goundhog Slay,” in the Monsters (Dark Tide Book 5) novella collection. Indeed, Kolakowski has found a pretty sweet spot as a crossover author in his own right, effortlessly hopping back and forth between crime and horror and mixing up the two on occasion (The Boise Long-Pig Hunting Club and its sequel, regrettably, remain unread in Mount TBR, along with Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, and I can only imagine what those books must entail based on their titles!).
With Where the Bones Lie, Kolakowski turns his attention to the old reliable of crime fiction, the private detective, albeit in a round-about way, which fits Nick’s style to a T. Dash Fuller is a former Hollywood fixer. Got a celebrity you need dried out before dying of an OD just before making the publicity rounds for a new flick or big-budget streaming series? Or maybe the celeb has already OD’d and the cause of death needs to be adjusted to something more palatable by way of favors made to the police and medical examiner? Or maybe it’s the body of a rando the celeb was hooking up with that has sadly expired and now needs to be hidden? Or, hell, maybe you just need some paparazzi kneecapped. Dash is your guy. Or was, anyway. Dash is reformed and failing at being a stand-up comedian because, funny enough, he’s not all that funny. This means, of course, he’s broke and making fast food door deliveries and Ubering folks around isn’t making ends meet. Enter his old boss, Manny, with one last job. One thing leads to another, yada yada yada, and pretty soon Dash find himself involved with Madeline Ironwood, who has hired him to find out who murdered her drug-running father, Ken. Ken’s skeleton, you see, has recently been discovered in a barrel that had been sunk in a lake, but climate changing being what it is, said lake is no more, wildfires are ravaging the landscape, and all kinds of secrets are finding their way back into the sun.
Kolakowski’s opening pages set the stage for an interesting dilemma — what happens when you’re really good at doing bad things? For Dash, it’s a personal crisis that results in stomach cramps best relieved by punishing amounts of alcohol and snark because he is, after all, a not-quite private eye of the hard-boiled tradition, and because healthy coping mechanisms make for poor drama. Both Dash and Madeline make light of the fact that finding out what happened to Ken is cheaper than therapy, but there’s an unmissable truth in such jokes. Both have long-standing, albeit wildly different, issues in need of resolution. For Dash these are brought to the forefront as Manny reenters his life and dredges up a past that Dash finds impossible to escape, and which has literally crippled him with guilt. During the course of his investigation into Ken’s disappearance he suffers a panic attack. His dreams are waking nightmares that make for fitful sleep. He sees a black-clad figure in a skull mask stalking him wherever he goes, a figure that may or may not actually be there.
Dash makes for an interesting character study. He’s impulsive and self-assured in his skills, but so riddled with doubt and guilt that he can’t keep doing all the things he’s so good at. His talents have made his existence a living hell. But it’s not until Madeline enters the picture that he finds a pathway into do-goodery. Former footnote of an actress Madeline makes for an equally intriguing foil, and it’s clear Kolakowski had a lot of fun writing these two. She’s a wildcat, and there’s a natural charm to the repartee between her and Dash. It’s refreshing, too, to see their relationship founded on mutual respect and professionalism, rather than the typical ‘will they or won’t they’ tropes often found in similar set-ups.
Where the Bones Lie subverts just enough of the usual expectations that it feels fresh and enjoyable, and Kolakowski puts a unique spin on the private dick character with his focus on mental health and finding balance in a truly off-kilter world. With shades of Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole novels by way of Jordan Harper’s outstanding Everybody Knows, Kolakowski delivers an intriguing PI page-turner that reminds us just how dark sunny California can get.
