IQ series continues with a twisty marvel

“Smoke” is the fifth novel in the IQ series by Joe Ide. If you’ve read any of his other novels starring the rogue East Long Beach private investigator Isaiah Quintabe, known as “IQ,” you know that Ide doesn’t write conventional suspense stories – ones with linear plots that move from point A to Z with a few slippery red herrings strewn across the road. As a novel, “Smoke” is a bizarre marvel: its narrative winding evil and preposterousness round and round.

In the opening of “Smoke,” Isaiah has put his little house in East Long Beach on the market, bid a painful farewell to the love of his life, an artist named Grace, and hit the road. Isaiah is suffering from Private Eye PTSD. He was done. But crime isn’t done with Isaiah. Driving north, Isaiah randomly stops at the quaint town of Coronado Springs, surrounded by “shadowy woods.” He rents a one-bedroom guesthouse “in a quiet, threadbare neighborhood” and settles in to read e-books.

It’s a quiet, albeit melancholy life that, at first, is interrupted only by incidents of mundane racism.

Not for long. Shortly after an encounter with a racist police officer, a young man named Billy – who is obsessed with serial killers and who’s just escaped from a hospital psychiatric ward – breaks into Isaiah’s kitchen. Even as he knows not to get involved, Isaiah agrees to hide Billy from that same police officer IQ ran into earlier. Billy is soon joined in Isaiah’s house by a young woman whose sister was murdered by a serial killer. And, inevitably, that serial killer himself soon arrives in town, thus befouling Isaiah’s refuge.

Confused? It all makes sense in the whirl of Ide’s fate-driven universe.

In an IQ novel, there are always many simultaneous subplots that could be introduced with the transition “Meanwhile.” In “Smoke,” the most inventive subplot involves Isaiah’s good friend Dodson, who’s played Watson to IQ’s Sherlock on many a case. Dodson’s wife, Cherise, has given him an ultimatum: take the mainstream job she’s lined up for him at an advertising agency or move out.

Dodson’s adventures in Don Draper-land are a welcome antidote to the all-too-vivid sadism of the serial killer loose in Coronado Springs.

In its own idiosyncratic fashion, “Smoke” is superb. Just be forewarned: after enduring the horror and screwball absurdities of the novel’s extended grand and bloody climax, readers may well feel that they, like IQ himself, need a restorative break.