A big national corporation, Consolidated Scavenger, uses sleazy tactics to bully a locally based recycling collective out of business. A manager at the collective, Recycle Berkeley (a.k.a. ReBe), has split up with her longtime lover and ReBe cofounder and defected to the corporate outfit. The ex-lover is outraged by her complicity in this hostile takeover attempt and is quick to vent his outrage and disdain. Brian Hunter, a bored bookkeeper trying to recycle himself as a writer for an alternative paper, lands in the middle of this dicey situation, getting caught between newsroom and bedroom. He continues his investigative reporting on the trash wars, reporting that morphs into a crime investigation when he discovers the woman’s dead ex in the recycling yard.

Barry does a great job of mixing gore and comedy—a dead dog gets tossed onto a banquet table at a recycling awards dinner, while his protagonist blunders into a shack full of drunken hit men. Barry’s humor keeps him from inventing a moralistic conflict between the collective David and the corporate Goliath. In fact, you almost side with Goliath because of Barry’s mercilessly hilarious depiction of politically correct, slogan-spouting members of the collective, as well as their allies, marching through Berkeley on a ragtag Halloween protest, with our wannabe journalist as Santa Claus. This avoidance of one-dimensional judgment is also a virtue of his first novel, Bones in the Wash, set during the 2008 presidential campaign, in which Barry himself participated. His heroine is an avid Obama supporter, and while Republican chicanery is subject to constant ridicule, the egotism and arrogance of ambitious young Democrats is also a target.

Book Reviewer's Disclaimer: I’ve known John Byrne Barry for a number of years and spurred him to finish Wasted by pointing out a truth that he had never before noticed—that he was destined to write this novel because the main dilemmas of traditional waste disposal are embedded in his very name, Byrne and Barry.  

Purchase Wasted for $2.99 as an e-book or $12.99 in paperback.