A novel like this one that aspires to greater meaning needs more than an assembly of hard men and noir idioms to make it...
A wolf expert travels to a peculiar Alaskan village to investigate a series of child murders.
There’s a bit of bait and switch going on in this murky, brittle novel. The opening chapters lead you to believe this will be a wilderness-survival story centered on Russell Core, an elderly expert on wolves whose field research once led him to kill one of the great beasts. Carrying his grudging respect for the animals, Core travels to the hamlet of Keelut at the behest of Medora Slone, whose 6-year-old son, Bailey, is the third local child to have been taken in the night. After some impenetrable warnings from a local crone (“You would bar the door against the wolf, why not more against beasts with the souls of damned men, against men who would damn themselves to beasts”), Core investigates the local pack to find no evidence the boy was killed by wolves. Back at Medora’s house, he finds that she's fled and quickly discovers Bailey’s body buried in the basement. The bulk of the book concerns Bailey’s father, Vernon, a vet who returns home from an unidentified war and embarks on a killing spree with indistinct motives, with Medora seemingly marked as the final target. Core, meanwhile, is laid up with the flu for two weeks in a local hotel before conveniently being resurrected to serve as witness to the novel’s denouement. Ultimately, the First Blood–like vigilante violence is unearned and confusing, while Core’s participation seems the act of a literary writer trying to bring emotional substance where little exists. Giraldi (Busy Monsters, 2012) is borrowing, less successfully, from the same well as Cormac McCarthy and Daniel Woodrell, but the novel's affectation of style can't support what is ultimately a gloomy and unsatisfying tale.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-87140-667-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
Welcome to Margrave, Georgia—but don't get too attached to the townsfolk, who are either in on a giant conspiracy, or hurtling toward violent deaths, or both. There's not much of a welcome for Jack Reacher, a casualty of the Army's peace dividend, who's drifted into town idly looking for traces of a long-dead black jazzman. Not only do the local cops arrest him for murder, but the chief of police turns eyewitness to place him on the scene, even though Reacher was getting on a bus in Tampa at the time. Two surprises follow: The murdered man wasn't the only victim, and he was Reacher's brother Joe, whom he hadn't seen in seven years. So Reacher, who so far hasn't had anything personally against the crooks who set him up for a weekend in the state pen at Warburton, clicks into overdrive. Banking on the help of the only two people in Margrave he can trust—a Harvard-educated chief of detectives who hasn't been on the job long enough to be on the take, and a smart, scrappy officer who's taken him to her bed—he sets out methodically in his brother's footsteps, trying to figure out why his cellmate in Warburton, a panicky banker whose cell-phone number turned up in Joe's shoe, confessed to a murder he obviously didn't commit; trying to figure out why all the out-of- towners on Joe's list of recent contacts were as dead as he was; and trying to stop the local carnage, or at least direct it in more positive ways. Though the testosterone flows as freely as printer's ink, Reacher is an unobtrusively sharp detective in his quieter moments—not that there are many of them to judge by. Despite the crude, tough-naif narration, debut novelist Child serves up a big, rangy plot, menace as palpable as a ticking bomb, and enough battered corpses to make an undertaker grin.
Pub Date: March 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-399-14253-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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