ON THE BAYOU
by Sean Bridges
In Bridges’ relentless thriller, a DEA agent finds herself on a doomed raid in the Louisiana bayou, besieged by enemies on all sides.
DEA Special Agent Jennifer Nash is reeling after the disastrous conclusion of a surveillance mission that left her partner, and maybe her career, dead. Made a scapegoat and placed on forced leave, Jennifer is given a lifeline in the form of Project Deliverance, a high-profile operation targeting the transportation networks that sustain Mexican drug trafficking organizations throughout Louisiana. Not one to take a break, Jennifer heads to Baton Rouge, where Lt. Lincoln Chaffee and a team of local law enforcement officers, including Trooper Corey and Senior Trooper Walter Kershaw, are preparing to venture deep into Cajun country. Jennifer knows little about the world she’s entering. There, she finds hungover, loud-mouthed cops and locals with a distinctive drawl (one resident shrugs off Hurricane Katrina with the observation, “Dis place?…Is my home. And Katrina all we got out here was a little rain”). Alongside Chaffee’s Special Operations team, Jennifer is tasked with helping dismantle the Bass family operation, a target Chaffee insists is “not some Chemistry 101 mobile lab or Nazi Method trailer park” but rather “a substantial cook site” hidden deep in the Louisiana bayou. As Jennifer and the team head into the swamps, Bridges alternates between the present-day investigation and the history of Victor Bass and his sons, who were all raised on stories of violence and retribution. When Project Deliverance collapses in spectacular fashion, Jennifer, Corey, and several others find themselves stranded in the bayou, cut off from support and uncertain who among their supposed allies can be trusted. Pursued by criminals and hostile locals, the survivors struggle to navigate a landscape where every encounter could be deadly. With each step forward they take, they risk falling into a different (and dangerous) group’s territory.
Bridges wastes little time in getting into the action. The operation is executed with a razor’s-edge tension that the novel maintains as Jennifer is thrust from one dangerous situation into another. The author has an impressive handle on action sequences, though the violence he portrays can border on the extreme. Jennifer is an appealing protagonist, tough and intelligent without being invincible. (“Jennifer Nash was a follower who always helped lead. She was a leader who never let it go to her head. And at all times she was her own woman,” Bridges writes, summing her up neatly.) The Cajun setting is particularly well rendered, with plenty of authenticity and flavor. What begins as a cartel thriller evolves into a backwoods survival story—the operation’s name, Project Deliverance, surely being a nod to the similarly titled film—involving corrupt cops, religious fanatics, and other violent outlaw factions. The result is impressively imaginative but often feels out of control. Plot threads feel too easily tossed out as the narrative repeatedly veers gleefully in wholly new directions, leaving the novel to ultimately feel like less than the sum of its parts—though it still delivers an exciting, vividly realized ride through the bayou.A fast-paced thriller whose unwieldy plot is redeemed by sustained suspense and authentic bayou menace.