When I started reading "Family Values," Book 5 of Frank Miller's "Sin City" series, I found myself wondering why Dwight keeps getting to be the narrator-protagonist of the comic noir stories. Then I remembered that Marv and Hartigan are both dead, so it means it is either Dwight or somebody new and Miller will have to get to the latter sooner or later. But for the third time in the first five books, once again Dwight is the man.
Dwight shows up at Poppa's Olympian Palace, an old fashioned diner (you know the type; it looks like you could put it on wheels and hitch it to a train as a cheap dinner car) driving a VW Beetle (hey, it is a German car, so what is your complaint? Besides, you can always trade up). The place is riddled with bullets and whatever happened there Dwight is interested, and since deadly little Miho is backing him up we have to think it has something to do with the girls of Old Town. The problem is that nobody is talking about why what happened at Poppa's happened and it takes a while and a couple of versions of the tale to figure out the meaning of the key detail Miller keeps working into the art. You are not going to be able to figure out what is going on until it is all laid out for you, but that is not necessarily a bad thing (as opposed to telegraphing the ending). I also like a red herring, especially when it walks on four legs.
It seems like every killing in Sin City is revenge for a previous killing, which just means there is another killing in Sin City that needs to be revenged and the cycle goes on and on and on. But there is a moral to this particular story and as Dwight notes it is a great big wide world out there and there's all kinds of families in it. Apparently they all play by the same rules, it is just that some are a lot better at it, especially when it comes to covering their tracks. The best part of this story is the way Dwight has to unravel the truth, moving from one source to the next to find out another layer of the truth so that he and Miho know exactly who has to pay for what happened (and we finally get to find out what really happened).
"Family Values" is a relative short "Sin City" tale, coming it at 126 black & white pages and I think picking pink as the color on the cover to go along with the drawing of Miho in the snow might be a made choice (besides red and yellow, do any colors really make sense in Miller's "Sin City"). Miller does some nice things with the snow in Book 5 that are interesting, but reducing Miho to a ghostly figure of pure white takes a little getting used to (especially if you want to start unpacking the symbolic value of doing so in contrast to the shadows and dirt of Sin City in general). It is a rather simple and ordinary tale by "Sin City" standards, but that still makes it above average if you are looking at the overall genre of graphic novels.