BOOMWILD

Kildare, the author of The Tragedy of Beauty (2018), offers a neo-Western set on the prairies of North Dakota during a 21st-century oil boom.

In the early 2000s, precise directional drilling became a viable technology for recovering oil, so regions located over the Bakken Formation (a massive rock under the ground in Montana, North Dakota, and parts of Canada) saw rapid upticks in industry, revenue, and population. The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, nestled in the northeastern corner of North Dakota, was no exception. But with the rapid boom came social consequences, and Gena Blood Crow, a young tribal cop, is determined to guard her community from the encroaching presence of drugs, crime, and corruption. Although her mission is personal—her own brother was murdered by members of a drug cartel—she’s often frustrated by her perpetually understaffed department and a seemingly inescapable maze of competing jurisdictions. Her uncle, the stubborn Boots Charging Thunder, decides to take revenge into his own hands and organize a local militia to eliminate the cartel by whatever means necessary. Law enforcement, the militia, and the cartel are soon heading toward one another on an inevitable crash course. What could have been a simplistic tale of good guys versus bad is complicated by the machinations of local bureaucracy and politics—and by villains who fall in love with heroes’ innocent relatives, which is true to the nature of life in a small town. One cartel leader stands out as a memorably complex figure: Rafael Vega is a seasoned drug runner and a coldblooded killer, but he also senses others’ sadness and feels guilty about the blood on his hands; he’s even conversant in chaos theory. An unexpected love affair also gives him a profound desire to change his life. Kildare’s tightly controlled sentences and smooth dialogue are engaging and chock-full of splendid detail aside from the occasional cliché (“The puppet had become the puppet master”).

An easy, fast-paced tale of criminal intrigue that’s part Wild West, part Fargo.