Murderburg by Carol Lay

I thought this book collected Carol Lay's single-page strips - the "Murderburg Chronicles" that have been running in her weekly strip Lay Lines for at least the last year or two. And those pieces are a lot of fun, but they're a bit dense, so I didn't get to the two-hundred-and-fifty-page Murderburg quite as quickly as I expected - I almost read it a couple of times, but put it down for something I thought would be zippier.

Reader, Murderburg is actually a collection of six comics-format stories about the inhabitants of Murderburg. It is zippy and fun and just a bit dark, and I wish I'd jumped and read it as soon as I heard it was published in March. So if you're waiting as well, stop reading me right now and go grab Murderburg instead.

Lay published these stories in various places - the book doesn't say where - during the 2010s, under the overall title "Murderville." (A Netflix series has since jumped up and taken that name, forcing a slight rebrand.) It's set on a bucolic island off the coast of Maine - actually named Muderburg, after the founder, but nick-named Murderburg over the years, for various reasons.

The stories all center on Mayor Leo Scazzo and his family: Leo was a mobster but has semi-retired, or perhaps gone into hiding, depending on how you look at it. Many of the other inhabitants of Muderburg have similarly complicated pasts - the current strips Lay's doing for Lay Lines get into that, one person at a time - and Muderburg is both a somewhat sleepy town dependent on the flow of tourists and a pit stop for "retiring" ne'er-do-wells who need new passports and faces and such.

Leo is central to all of the stories, with his wife Antonia and teenage vegan daughter Isabella also taking major roles in some of the tales. The younger kids, twins, are mostly hellions running about and getting underfoot. Muderburg has plenty of other colorful characters - again, see Lay Lines for many of their backgrounds - from a coroner and a lighthouse keeper to a ferry operator and a B&B owner.

Not all of the stories see the locals needing to actually kill from-aways, but it happens more than once. And some of the worst offenders are from the richer, less pleasant town Snobunquit - Lay is wonderful with names - which is right on the mainland near Muderburg, sending pretentious yuppie-types who annoy Muderburgers and wreak havoc on their landscape.

Interestingly, the postulated retiring-mobster pipeline in Muderburg doesn't come up directly in any of these stories; Lay has saved herself some story material for a sequel if she wants it. The wonderful map - tucked in between the first and second stories - also includes a number of places that could be triggers for additional stories if Lay wants: Lost Girls Island, The Downfall, Folly Ledge, Devilled Rocks, Widow's Walk.

So read and/or buy Murderburg: it's by Carol Lay, which means the art is stylish and precisely cartooned, the writing is pointed, the dialogue is sharp and amusing, the world capacious and interesting, and the stories energetic and amusing. Let's make this so much of a success that Lay is inspired to do a Murderburg II.