Killer Cuts & Dead Letters - Richard Lowe

Jackie has owned her salon on Henderson Avenue for seventeen years. She knows her clients the way good stylists know everyone: what they say, what they mean, what they're not saying, and what they've been doing at home to their hair that they'll pretend they haven't. She is precise, professional, and invisible in the way that service workers are invisible. Present for everything, noticed by no one.

Keisha delivers the mail. She knows the route better than some people know their own addresses. She knows who files complaints with the HOA, who leaves packages on the porch too long, who waves and who doesn't, and who has exactly the kind of personality that makes a person easy to dislike and difficult to mourn.

When an argument over an eighty-seven-dollar dinner ends with a client in the chair and Japanese shears moving at the wrong angle, Jackie does what she has always done: she calls Keisha. And Keisha does what she has always done: she shows up with rubber gloves and the expression of someone who is going to manage a situation rather than argue about it.

Killer Cuts & Dead Letters is a dark comedy set in South Florida about two working women whose professional skills, built over years of managing difficult people in tight quarters, turn out to be exactly the skills required for everything that follows. Jackie handles evidence the way she handles color correction: methodically, with attention to what other people miss. Keisha handles logistics the way she handles her route: efficiently, without drawing attention, because no one looks twice at the mail carrier.

FBI Special Agent Raymond Burrell is building a case. He is thorough, experienced, and working from a profile that makes complete sense. A male perpetrator, a discernible pattern, victims connected by something he hasn't quite identified yet. He is, in most respects, correct. He is also looking in entirely the wrong direction.

What follows is a novel about competence and invisibility, about the kind of people who keep everything running and are therefore never considered capable of anything else. It is also, quietly, very funny.