MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Wild West We Love to Read! Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:15:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.1 QUEEN OF AMERICA by Luis Alberto Urrea /2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/ /2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:11:36 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=22142 Book Quote:

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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Bibliography:

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

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]]> /2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/feed/ 0 ASSUMPTION by Percival Everett /2011/assumption-by-percival-everett/ /2011/assumption-by-percival-everett/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:32:31 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=22091 Book Quote:

“I’ll tell you what this is, it’s two gallons of shit in a one-gallon bucket.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (NOV 17, 2011)

The hardscrabble desert land of New Mexico is the perfect setting for Percival Everett’s new novel, Assumption, mainly because it mirrors the protagonist’s character incredibly well. Ogden Walker is a deputy in the sheriff’s office in the small town of Plata, where he serves after a brief stint in the army. Plata might be where mom Eva Walker lives but Ogden finds her presence not enough of a comfort to overcome his unease with his mixed African American heritage (he is biracial) or his general malaise with what seems to be a dead-end career. He finds it hard to be content hunting for the small fish even if a colleague tells him, “A big fish is fun, I suppose, but so are small ones sometimes. Depends on the water. If I catch a ten-incher in a creek that’s two foot wide, that’s a big fish.”

One day, when an old lady in town is shot dead in her own home, Walker is not sure quite where to begin. His investigations eventually lead him to discover that she might have been part of some hate groups — it’s a hard paradox to serve the very people who might wish you harm. Before this murder is completely resolved, there’s more trouble. The body count rises again, this time through a seemingly unrelated murder on the other end of town.

This incident has Walker chasing down prostitutes in seedy sections of Denver. This mystery snowballs into a third one where a fellow law enforcement agent is shot and again, nobody knows what happened and how. As Everett goes about putting all the pieces together, the writing increasingly reaches a feverish pitch and one wonders if anybody is keeping count as the body count ratchets up easily and steadily. “Warren moved on to the next structure, knowing nothing more than that he was confused,” writes Everett of Ogden’s coworker, Warren Fragua, “More so with each piece of this puzzle, if in fact these were pieces, if in fact this was a puzzle.” That same disorienting sensation works itself on to the pages of this fast-paced novel.

Assumption is full of razor-sharp dialog and Everett does a wonderful job of capturing the gritty landscape but the disparate story threads and sudden detours in the action occasionally make the book trying.

With the twists and turns in the story, the moral of the novel might well be to assume nothing. But it sure feels like Everett goes to great lengths just to make that point. After a while the story is not so much genre-bending as genre-defying. Readers who like their suspense stories resolved well will find Everett’s latest novel frustrating. Even the surprise ending might not help redeem matters in such a case.

On the other hand, readers who love the chase as much as the outcome, will find Assumption entertaining and a fun ride. When one of the characters in the novel points out that the whole mess is “hinky as hell,” they will only be too happy. After all, when it comes to murder mysteries, “hinky” is good.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Graywolf Press (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Percival Everett
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> /2011/assumption-by-percival-everett/feed/ 0 TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson /2011/train-dreams-by-denis-johnson/ /2011/train-dreams-by-denis-johnson/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:55:19 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=20619 Book Quote:

“He was standing on a cliff…into a kind of arena enclosing…Spruce Lake…and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  AUG 30, 2011)

Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art—a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called “The Race.” If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book’s protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning —- at least, he didn’t know his parents, and neither did he know where he was from originally. Some cousin suspected Canada, and said that he spoke only French when he was left off in Fry, Idaho, circa 1893, arriving there on the Great Northern Railroad as a young lad. His aunt and uncle were his parents, and he grew up in the panhandle by the Kootenai River with the loggers, the Indians, the Chinese, and the trains.

As the book opens in the summer of 1917, Grainier is helping his railroad crew of the Spokane International Railway (in the Idaho panhandle) hold a struggling Chinese laborer accused of stealing. They meant to throw him from the trestle, sixty feet above the rapids at the gorge, but the man, cursing and speaking in tongues, broke free and went hand-over-hand from beam to beam, until he disappeared.

“The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully…and any bad thing might come of it.”

And that was the signal incident that curses, spirits, and demons would inhabit the landscape of Grainier’s dreams. Often, in the background, is heard the melancholic whistle of the trains.

Johnson’s story is a portrait of early 20th-century America as witnessed through the itinerant Grainier, a scrupulous, dignified man whose wife and infant daughter were consumed in a fire in their cabin while he was miles away working on the railroad or in the forest as a logger. Grainier’s long life is seen through snapshots juxtaposed in a deliberately disjointed style, submerging our thoughts deep into the great Northwest, as forests are cleared and the trains tracks are laid that connect one land to the next.

Grainier came back and rebuilt on the burnt lot, the grief of his loss now a thing in his soul, a muted or massive thing, depending on his memories or his dreams. The dead spirit of his daughter appears in abstract or animal form to haunt him, and the wolves enter his soul.

“…when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth…It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart…”

Love, loss, death, and lust are wound into this short but powerful story, a story of a time that is receding from the collective American memories. Denis Johnson’s ode is an evocative and sublime remembrance of things past—of railroads built, of people buried, and of souls lost and wandering. Johnson awakens them, and puts them to rest.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Denis Johnson
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
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]]> /2011/train-dreams-by-denis-johnson/feed/ 0 BACK OF BEYOND by C. J. Box /2011/back-of-beyond-by-c-j-box/ /2011/back-of-beyond-by-c-j-box/#comments Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:53:39 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=20134 Book Quote:

“Even though he was exhausted and stabs of pain pulsed through his ear, Cody refused to take the medication they’d given him because he knew, he just knew, that if he let his defenses down even a little he’d start drinking. He knew himself. He’d find a justification to start off on another bender. His ear hurt; He was suspended; Precious hours for finding the killer had been wasted and he’d never get them back; His dog had died (granted, it was twenty years before, but it was still dead; He missed his son; His 401(k) wasn’t worth crap anymore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  AUG 20, 2011) Back of Beyond by C. J. Box is just what a mystery thriller should be – a wild ride through twists and turns with rogue characters that have depth of spirit and lots of baggage. This book is a hardcore page-turner with characters the reader gets to know well. It’s well-plotted and everything comes together just when it’s supposed to; no red herrings and no deus ex machina. Box knows exactly how to plot his book so that each page brings the reader closer to crisis and then conclusion. There is the dark side that is required in order for good to prevail and there are lots of cold, dark pathways that wind their way to a fine conclusion. Cody Hoyt is a rogue cop with a history of alcoholism and wild behavior. If he doesn’t like a suspect he will shoot him in the knee to get a confession. He’s been kicked out of the Denver police force and finds himself back in Helena, Montana where his people hail from. As he self-describes his family, they’re “white trash.” The only good thing to his credit is his son Justin, who has turned out to be a good kid raised primarily by his ex-wife, Jenny. As the book opens, Cody has been on the wagon for 59 days and is participating in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). His AA sponsor, Hank, is a man Cody trusts and who has guided him to his tentative sobriety. Cody finds out that Hank’s cabin has been destroyed by fire and that Hank has been killed. It appears, at first, to be a suicide but after careful investigation, Cody realizes it’s a homicide. He knows Hank and he knows that Hank would never take his life. He also realizes that Hank’s AA coins are missing and Hank never kept these coins far from his person. Whoever killed Hank stole the coins and made the scene look like a suicide. The only person who believes Cody is his partner, Larry. The clues that Cody finds lead him to an outfitter called Wilderness Adventures run by one Jed McCarthy. Jed is a narcissistic self-promoter who is about to start his longest trip of the season into Yellowstone Park. He calls this trip “Back of Beyond” because it goes so deep into the National Park. Unfortunately, Cody finds out that his son, Justin, along with Jenny’s fiancé, are on this trip. He tries to get to Yellowstone in time to prevent the trip from starting but doesn’t make it. Meanwhile, Cody gets suspended from the Helena police force and must make the trip alone as a civilian. He realizes that he’s being followed and stalked and that his very life is in danger. As he gets closer to the park, there is an attempt on his life. Cody becomes paranoid and doesn’t know who to trust. Could his partner Larry be his nemesis? The book has a lot of good information on alcoholism and recovery, both the disease, the confidentiality and the rehabilitation process. It shows Cody’s constant efforts to remain sober along with his slips. It also shows him picking himself up again to get on the wagon. I was impressed by how much Box knows about AA and the program. The reader can’t help but notice the author’s love and respect for the wilderness. His descriptions of Yellowstone and its geologic formations are breathtaking. We get to see Wyoming and Montana from the eyes of a writer who loves the spaces of the great outdoors. Back of Beyondis hard to put down. It’s one of those thrillers where each page adds new information and each of the characters are interesting. The book comprises the best of both worlds – it is character and action driven. It may be a bit formulaic but it’s a great formula, one that keeps the reader on his toes and coming back for more.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 83 readers
PUBLISHER: Minotaur Books; First Edition (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: C.J. Box
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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Bibliography:

Joe Pickett Series:

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]]> /2011/back-of-beyond-by-c-j-box/feed/ 0 ONCE UPON A RIVER by Bonnie Jo Campbell /2011/once-upon-a-river-by-bonnie-jo-campbell/ /2011/once-upon-a-river-by-bonnie-jo-campbell/#comments Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:30:22 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=19098 Book Quote:

“The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 18, 2011)

Odysseus was a legendary and cunning hero on a journey to find home, and lived by his guile. Annie Oakley was a sharpshooter with an epic aim, living by her wits. Siddhartha traveled on a spiritual quest to find himself, and defined the river by its timelessness—always changing, always the same. Now, in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s adventure story, we are introduced to sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, gutsy, feisty survivor who manifests a flawed blend of all three heroes, who lives once and inexorably upon a river.

Raised on the Stark River by throwback hicks (some who are rich) in rural Murrayville, Michigan, Margo can shoot and skin a buck, fish like Papa Hemingway, and fire a bullet clean through a rabbit’s eye. She’s a free spirit, a river sprite, a dog lover, an oarswoman and a woodcutter. Her heroine is Annie Oakley, a renowned figure that she hopes to embody.

A series of incidents in Margo’s young life cause her to run away. Her beloved grandfather dies, and her mother—who never adapted to the river life—abandons the family. At fifteen, Margo is raped by her Uncle Cal, but is more perplexed than traumatized when it happens.

“Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus.”

It takes a year for Margo to comprehend that she was violated; circumstances eventually culminate in a baroque twist on a Mexican standoff–with one dead body, one tip-shot pecker, and one pissed off family. She quits school, grabs her Marlin .22, boards her rowboat, and heads up river with her mother’s address found under her father’s bed. She is determined to reunite with her mother and forge a new life.

Margo likes to hear the water rustle against the rocks; sleep under a canopy of stars; watch the pink dawn of the sky; listen to whip-poor-wills call from the trees; and count blue herons as they wade in the river. But her journey is tangled by an undertow of complications, a ripple effect of the sand and silt and muddiness she brought with her from Murrayville and continues to accumulate. Margo has a ripe sexuality, a flood of pheromones and hormones coursing through the channels of her body like a tidal wave. As she paddles upstream, she bounces from one man to the next, (lying about her age), leaving a wake of misadventures at each stop, with minimal contemplation between disasters. With each imbroglio, she unwittingly tugs at the past, pulling it into the present and future, like floating debris that follows along.

The reader is enticed to root for Margo, but I was turned off by her attraction to losers and drunks and skeptical of extremes in her nature. The commando girl power was redundant—she was a superwoman of courage and resolve, and when it was favorable, she would vulnerably depend on the kindness of strangers, who appeared at convenient times. She also inflicts some irreparable damage to a menacing one-eye-blind man from the recent past—his brute strength was reminiscent of the Cyclops in the Odyssey–and then wipes her hands of it with too much nonchalance.

The adventures lack variety or surprise–Margo’s marvel trick shots often gild the lily, and whatever a grown man can do, she can do better. Her noble relationship with Smoke, an elderly, smelly, chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound hermit with emphysema, is supposed to be the pinnacle of the story, but it reeked of authorial manipulation. Margos’ beneficence is obviously meant to offset her other transgressions, which only calls attention to the incredulity of this relationship. When she climbs in bed (platonically) and sleeps with Smoke as an act of virtuous love, it came off as orchestrated. Smoke ultimately became a plot/story device, rewarding Margo with the right things at the right time.

Despite the obvious flaws, Campbell’s story is a page-turner. Her prose is warm, rollicking, and natural. She conveys a spiritual power to the river and surrounding environs, massaging the narrative with the raw power of nature. Margo is earthy, plucky, and engaging, a passionate heroine with a physical, sensual nature and double-barrel gaze. The loose ends in this story imply that a series is in the works, or a follow-up novel.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 13 readers
PUBLISHER: W. W. Norton & Company (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Bonnie Jo Campbell
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> /2011/once-upon-a-river-by-bonnie-jo-campbell/feed/ 0 HELL IS EMPTY by Craig Johnson /2011/hell-is-empty-by-craig-johnson/ /2011/hell-is-empty-by-craig-johnson/#comments Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:50:31 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=18887 Book Quote:

“The snow was already creating ridges around me, the high points of my profile forming sculpted edges, but it seemed different, as if the snow was not only changing colors but texture, too. Sand; it was like sand, and as I watched, the wind began to winnow the dunes — and then me along with them. First the shoulder that I’d damaged in Vietnam folded into itself and blew away, my ear, then a leg, a hand, quickly followed by a wrist, a foot. It was all very strange, as if I were watching myself disintegrate into the wind.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew  (JUN 30, 2011)

William Walk Sacred describes the Native American vision quest experience as a time when, “You are presenting yourself before the Great Spirit and saying, ‘Here I am. I am pitiful. I am naked.” “You’re down to the nitty gritty of who you are.” He adds, “You cannot go off the path at that point because you are now owned by the spirits. They watch you continuously. There is no hiding.” This quest to gain spiritual insights and to, in effect, travel to God, can be compared to the allegorical journey taken in Dante’s The Divine Comedy in which a soul moves through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Of course, hell (Inferno) is the most gripping. The ninth circle of Dante’s hell holds those guilty of treachery in an icy prison, with Satan encased waist-high in the center. How fitting then that Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County, Wyoming should find himself in a mountain snow storm with a beat-up copy of Dante’s Inferno, battling the elements, violent men, his own limits of endurance, and mysteries of the mind and spirit — in effect, undergoing his own involuntary vision quest.

Walt begins this arduous journey sitting in a restaurant with four convicts he and Deputy Saizarbitoria (the Basquo) intend to deliver to the feds. Three of the cons are confirmed murderers already, and some black humor serves as table talk as the lawmen keep count of how many times Marcel Popp threatens to kill them. Tension crackles even this early as one wonders whether there will be an escape attempt before they even finish their meal. The suspense builds about when it will happen (the escape) because of course it must for the novel to proceed, yet the reader is still surprised when and how it occurs.

Searching for these desperate escapees who have taken hostages with them onto higher ground, Walt has a head start on other law enforcement and refuses to slow down to let them catch up, fearing that to do so could cost more innocent lives than have already been taken. As he doggedly tracks the men and is able to somewhat winnow down the human odds against him, he faces other (weather-driven) obstacles. He finds himself pinned under a snow vehicle at one point. A ferocious wildfire bears down on him at another. Exhaustion and injuries test the sheriff to the max, and he isn’t sure he is going to survive this search for the most dangerous of the convicts: Shade (yes, Inferno reveals its shades too…). Fortunately, Virgil, a seven-foot Native American who wears a bear skin complete with head, comes to Walt’s aid, providing him with shelter and challenging him to a makeshift game of chess while waiting for the dead of night to pass. Virgil is more than a passing character though. Walt isn’t sure how to tell him that one of Shade’s murders is both the spur for this escape from custody and directly connected to Virgil. During one of the sheriff’s direst intervals, Walt implores Virgil, “…I’m not going to make it — and I need to tell you something.”

Shade is a man driven by his past and the commands of the disembodied. Voices (spirits?) speak to Shade and early on at the restaurant, he tells Walt: “I didn’t have to go to the bathroom but wanted to speak to you alone about the snow and the voices.” He believes the lawman may experience the spirits too and doesn’t want to be the only one who goes through a private, hellish spiritual quest. Indeed, Walt and Virgil seem to flicker in and out of “normal” existence as they unrelentingly tramp on in pursuit of Shade, trading dialogue on their uncertainty about where the line is between life and death. One says to the other, “Well, whichever one of us is dead, we’d better get going. I’d hate to think that the Old Ones went to all the trouble of bringing us back and that we couldn’t get the job done.” Getting the job done will only be possible if Walt can brave everything in his path and hold true to himself when his mind is stripped naked before nature and Reality.

Hell is Empty is described by author Craig Johnson as “the most challenging novel I’ve attempted so far and, like Dante, I would’ve found it difficult to make such an effort without my own guides into the nether regions.” Although this is the seventh Walt Longmire novel, I’ve only had the opportunity to read one other:  Junkyard Dogs, the book published before this one. So, I cannot gauge whether Hell outshines all predecessors. I did think it was the superior read in relation to Dogs. However, the two novels arguably satisfy different literary appetites. While this novel is a meaty existential thriller about a man down to the barest threads of his own consciousness, Dogs is a tale of a group of misfits whose walk on the wrong side of the law causes them to come to bad ends. There is a sense of justice by mishap imposed on dumb but not so malicious meddling. However, intentional criminality creeps in as the catalyst for what goes down. Although this is primarily a review of Hell, I’d like to go into a little detail about Dogs:

The opening has Walt investigating an improbable “accident” revolving around a young woman, Gina Steward, who drove off from home in her car. A car to which her husband, Duane, had tied an old man for “safety” while the old guy was working on the family roof. Naturally, the senior citizen, the “Grampus” of the Stewart clan, went for an unexpected open-air ride, and it was a while before Gina, who didn’t notice her bouncing baggage, could be stopped. Fortunately, Grampus Geo Stewart survived this rough road excursion.

The Stewarts run a junkyard, complete with menacing junkyard dogs, adjacent to a relatively new development of expensive homes, and Ozzie Dobbs Jr. frets about what that does to his inherited investment in the development. On the other hand, Ozzie’s mother and Geo are a cozy, if clandestine, couple (ala Hatfields and McCoys or Romeo and Juliet, take your pick). Pretty soon Walt and his loyal department have two suspicious deaths on their hands and have to tease out the clues. Will Walt and his people find that that the junkyard guard dogs’ ferocity can’t match that of their human masters? Or are the people more victims of society or circumstance than anything else? No especially big revelations about human nature rise to the top, but the plot moves quickly and ends cleverly. It’s a sharp, sometimes laugh-out-loud mystery honing a dark edge to a group of seeming bumblers. It’s tone and subject matter stride along most entertainingly. However its tale is, as mentioned, less weighty than that of Hell is Empty.

Walt Longmire reminds me of Walt Fleming, the Idaho sheriff who stars in a series by Ridley Pierson. Then too, bookshelves abound with crime series in scenic, untamed geographic locations with a main hero, a beloved crew of trusty sidekicks, and, usually, a love interest who is somehow connected to law enforcement too. Craig Johnson is obviously practiced at delivering plots that make putting down the book very undesirable. His protagonist is someone a reader can feel good to be around — which adds a reading comfort level since the stories are told in the first person. Even though they are part of a busy niche, the Walt Longmire mysteries belong toward the front of the queue.

Hell is Empty is Craig Johnson’s effort to stretch his writing abilities. No slouch before, he has done an admirable job. His taut mixture of action and character development is nearly flawless, and his literary dollops enrich the novel. Man versus mountain, man versus man, man versus mind, man versus The Beyond. What could be better?

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 53 readers
PUBLISHER: Viking Adult (June 2, 2011)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Craig Johnson
EXTRAS:

 
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]]> /2011/hell-is-empty-by-craig-johnson/feed/ 0 DOC by MARY DORIA RUSSELL /2011/doc-by-mary-doria-russell/ /2011/doc-by-mary-doria-russell/#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 13:38:52 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=18160 Book Quote:

“Things happened. He reacted. Sometimes he took a rebellious pride in the cold-blooded courage of certain unconsidered deeds; just as often, he repented of his rashness afterward. There is, for example, nothing quite like lying in a widening pool of your own blood to make you reconsider the wisdom of challenging bad-tempered men with easy access to firearms.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirsten Merrihew  (MAY 24, 2011)

Doc relates how it might have been during 1878-79 when Dr. John Henry Holliday lived in Dodge City, Kansas. “The Deadly Dentist” who later gained fame or infamy, depending on perspective, for “pistoleering” along with the surviving Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral, saved Wyatt Earp’s life in Dodge first. Earp is said to have credited Holliday with saving him, but apparently didn’t share details, so history isn’t sure of the facts. But this novel presents its own story of how it might have happened.

While in Dodge, Holliday also met “Big Nose Kate,” who would become his common law wife. As for earning a living, his ability to practice his profession was limited by the chronic, wracking cough of his consumption (tuberculosis) — few wanted their faces so close to his, but Doc imagines scenes in which Holliday gets Wyatt into his chair and fixes the other man’s supposedly marred smile for him. To afford his fancy clothes, a long residence in the best rooms of the local hotel, and additional high-spending habits, Doc (as he told folks to call him) dealt faro and took part in other high-stakes card games at night. He’d come West from his native Georgia in hopes that the drier air would improve his lungs, but the dust irritated them further and he drank bourbon in large quantities to “calm” his coughing, often imbibing to drunken unpredictability. A cultured Southern gentleman by upbringing, Doc allowed the coarseness of the West to shape his habits to a degree, developing even before he arrived in Dodge, a shady reputation. But he also retained an appreciation for literature and music, and this novel portrays him as a man concerned with justice for all, even a Chinese…and young black man whose suspicious death Doc was determined to lay on someone’s moral account.

Author Mary Doria Russell, best known so far for her philosophical science fiction hit, The Sparrow, uses her prodigious talents for clear and sometimes very beautiful prose to speculate on a very different subject, but just as she brought readers into Father Emilio Sandoz’s reality, she now brings us into Doc Holliday’s happenstance. Clearly, Russell would like to dispel some of Doc’s outlaw reputation, for she writes on the first page of the first chapter,

“At thirty, he would be famous for his part in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. A year later, he would become infamous when he rode at Wyatt Earp’s side to avenge the murder of Wyatt’s younger brother Morgan. To sell newspapers, the journalists of his day embellished thin facts with fat rumor and rank fiction; it was they who invented the iconic frontier gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. (Thin. Mustachioed. A cold and casual killer. Doomed and always dressed in black as though for his own funeral).”

As though to balance the scales, Russell’s story quotes a hotel bellhop in Glenwood Springs where Doc Holliday died in November, 1887 at age 36: “We all liked him. He bore his illness with fortitude, and he was grateful for the slightest kindness. Doc was a very fine gentleman, and he was generous when he tipped.”

In her concluding Author’s Note, Russell takes on the obvious question: “Arriving at the end of historical fiction today, the modern reader is likely to wonder, ‘How much of that was real?’ In this case, the answer is not all of it but a lot more than you might think.” That sounds reassuring. However, the fact is that Doc begins Holliday’s life by proposing an historically questioned premise, namely that he was born with a cleft palate and that his physician uncle repaired the outer damage when John Henry was only two months old. Some historians insist that such an operation successfully concluded at such a tender age would have made medical journals. However, no record can be found, so they doubt the veracity of the claim. Some even doubt that Doc ever had a cleft palate at all because pictures of him as an adult, sans moustache, don’t reveal an upper lip scar. So, one can wonder whether Russell decided to use disputed biographical “facts” in order to create more sympathy for the man or to at least portray him with one more strike against him than he actually overcame when she writes he learned to speak properly despite the unrepaired split palate inside his mouth.

For its own reasons, Doc also may have misrepresented Holliday’s long-term but intermittent lover, Mary Katherine Harony ( aka “Kate Elder” or “Big Nose Kate”) as a prostitute. According to some historians, there is no real proof that Harony was. Perhaps, she might have been mistaken for another hooker Kate in town. Or, she could have been cat house madam without herself servicing the customers. Or, she may have been a working girl for a time and then given it up. No one seems certain. Perhaps Russell chooses to make her an “independent” prostitute even during her up/down relationship with Doc to, in part, illustrate further the egalitarian side of Holliday that the author also brings out in other ways. Regardless, this novel seeks to portray the “seedy” sex trade of the West in a softer light, expressing a sense of empathy for the women who made their way in life by selling their bodies (after all, few other opportunities were open to unmarried women out West). The reader gets to understand Russell’s version of Kate and see why she vacillated between Doc and other men. One reason is that Doc couldn’t hold onto his earnings, and Kate felt the need to have her own stream of income. Whatever the truth, Russell shows a Kate who kept coming back to Doc:

“…She knew how to calm him after the dream, how to steady him while he coughed until his throat was raw and his chest burned. She knew how much bourbon was enough to help him catch his breath, and she knew how to make him forget, for a time, his mother’s illness and his own.

“Afterward, she always asked, ‘I’m a good woman to you, ain’t I, Doc?’ He always agreed. When he fell asleep again, she felt the satisfaction of a job well done.”

Doc isn’t just about Holliday and Kate (who, it must be included, like Holliday, was educated in the classics and languages, and that may have been her greatest attraction for the dentist/gambler/gunfighter — she could stimulate his mind too). The novel provides an overview of many of the residents of Dodge: the lawmen, the politicians, the men of commerce, the non-whites, a few Jesuits, the women, the toll gate family, the horses, etc., giving the reader a peek into this rough-and-tumble western town. This fictive recreation is a strong point of the book as we see the complex social, economic, and political pressures that made law and order elusive and justice raw and hard.

The other strength is the novel’s humanizing of Doc Holliday. Although, as mentioned, history can’t provide us with material to back up all of Russell’s contentions, still it is fascinating to see the seemingly contradictory character she presents: a man who stubbornly struggled against his lung disease for 15 years before finally being overcome, a man who didn’t usually start gun fights but would finish them, a man who played heavenly music on pianos when they were tuned correctly, a thoughtful man concerned with justice, a man who was fast with a gun.

However, the novel’s concentration on Doc’s time in Dodge also has its downside. The reader should not expect any in-depth retelling of the Tombstone confrontation or Doc’s subsequent ride by Wyatt Earp’s side. Russell deals with the early and later parts of Holliday’s life in quick packages at the beginning and end of the book, and the bulk of the narrative tends to get a little repetitive as Doc went about his gambling, coughing, a dab of dentistry, fighting with Kate, etc. There is some plot, but arguably there could have been more had Russell permitted herself to begin in earnest in Dodge and then move on to Tombstone and beyond.

Doc is a novel I’ll remember because it describes the Wild West and its survivalist mentality while also illuminating the civilized, decent motivations and actions that those who came to live there brought with them and did not surrender. Violence by nature and man was a fact of life, but human kindness, honor, and sacrifice shone through too. Doc Holliday was a suffering man who adapted somewhat awkwardly to the West, but he did retain some of the gentlemanly, cultural roots his mother had instilled in him. Russell’s Doc is a product of her imagination, but the author may have come closer to his true self than others — biographers, filmmakers, novelists — have.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 107 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mary Doria Russell
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:Dreamers of the DayAnd another Western character reimagined in fiction:

Etta by Gerald Kolpan

Bibliography:

Sci-Fi:

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  • Our Chiefest Pleasure
]]> /2011/doc-by-mary-doria-russell/feed/ 0 COLD WIND by C.J. Box /2011/cold-wind-by-c-j-box/ /2011/cold-wind-by-c-j-box/#comments Mon, 09 May 2011 02:55:28 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=17037 Book Quote:

“When someone hurts a member of your family, no matter what the reason, he’s hurt you by proxy. You go after him and get revenge. People need to know there are consequences for their actions, especially when it comes to our loved ones. That’s the only way to keep some kind of order in the world….”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (MAY 08, 2011)

C. J. Box’s Cold Wind is set in a part of Wyoming that is beautifully scenic and, in some ways, untamed. When an enemy threatens one of Box’s characters, the prospective victim does not automatically dial 911. He is more likely to take matters into his own hands. The hero, Joe Pickett, is a game warden and devoted family man who values harmony over conflict. Much to Joe’s displeasure, he is caught up in a web of deceit and violence when his wife’s latest stepfather, “multi-millionaire developer and media mogul, Earl Alden,” is shot dead and found hanging from one of his own windmill turbines. Joe’s mother-in-law, Missy Alden is charged with the crime, and although he has no jurisdiction, Joe undertakes his own unofficial investigation out of obligation to his wife and daughters.

“Joe, I don’t want her found innocent because Marcus Hand ran rings around Lisa in court. I want her found innocent because she didn’t do it. Don’t you understand?  I don’t want this hanging over our girls.  I don’t want it hanging over my head.”

In a parallel plot, Nate Romanowski, a former member of a “rogue branch” of Special Forces, is lying low, since he has bitter enemies who would like his head on a platter. One of them has picked up his trail and is bent on vengeance.

This is an earthy, dryly humorous, and action-packed novel that captures the spirit of the mountainous west. Jumping into the 11th book in the series, the characters sometimes seem like thinly drawn stereotypes.   Missy Alden has been married five times and is a selfish, manipulative, and overbearing harridan; Nate’s lover, Alisha, and Joe’s wife, Marybeth, are sweet and altruistic; two shiftless low-lives, Johnny and Drennen, are overly fond of liquor, meth, and loose women; and Sheriff Kyle McLanahan is less interested in fair play than in getting reelected. Although Joe occasionally bends the rules to achieve his goals, at least he feels guilty about it.

Yet the backstory of the main characters is revealed enough for us to follow their lives and I’m sure for those you have stuck with this series from the beginning, they will welcome learning more about Joe Pickett and his current situation with his mother-in-law. They will also be hoping that Joe and Nate, who have had a falling out from something that happened in the previous novel, can get over it and help each other out with each other’s troubles.

An intriguing theme (hence the title), is the huge amount of money to be made in renewable energy by private entrepreneurs — and how that money is funded by the government.  As the author says in an interview, the face of the west is changing with hundreds of gleaming 250-foot wind turbines is part of the landscape.  He says, “There are those who look at miles of wind towers and see the energy source of the future. Others look at the same sight and see an abomination. Me, I wondered if it was possible to hang a body off one of the blades and what that body would look like after rotating at a hundred miles per hour.” Which is where Joe Pickett finds Earl Alden in the opening chapter of this book. Before his death, Earl Alden invested a small fortune in turbines (“each tower was a hundred feet higher than the Statue of Liberty”) to generate wind power. When Joe and Marybeth look into Alden’s business dealings, they make some surprising discoveries. Like Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, in which the debate on global warming is given an ugly marketing twist; Box’s characters also find a negative side to the wind energy business, and although it may or may not be a motive for murder, it is an interesting look at the whole business.

Cold Wind will appeal to readers who like clearly delineated good guys and bad guys. In Box territory, folks do not pussyfoot around. They settle their differences the old-fashioned way–using knives, guns, or whatever weapon is needed to get the job done. In a politically correct world, there is something bracing about individuals who take a direct approach. If you prefer works of fiction filled with ambiguity, sentiment, and indecisiveness, Box may not be your cup of tea. On the other hand, those who enjoy morality tales with tough-talking hombres will likely find Cold Wind as refreshing as an ice-cold beer on a hot summer’s day.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 78 readers
PUBLISHER: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (March 22, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: C.J. Box
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:

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Joe Pickett Series:

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]]> /2011/cold-wind-by-c-j-box/feed/ 0 WEST OF HERE by Jonathan Evison /2011/west-of-here-by-jonathan-evison/ /2011/west-of-here-by-jonathan-evison/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:11:32 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=16193 Book Quote:

“We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 16, 2011)

Visit the website for the National Park Service and you will find that the Elwha River Restoration project is a key one for the Olympic National Park in Washington state. “Elwha River Restoration will restore the river to its natural free-flowing state, allowing all five species of Pacific salmon and other anadromous fish to once again reach habitat and spawning grounds,” the project literature explains.

It is with this kernel of truth that writer Jonathan Evison spins a grand tale in his new novel, West of Here. The novel essentially looks at environmental decisions made during the late 1800s, when the American frontier moved rapidly west, and land grabs were in full swing—and the consequences of those same decisions more than a hundred years on.

Arguably the central protagonist in the novel—one populated by dozens of characters—is Ethan Thornburgh who envisions a dam across the mighty Elwha to harness its energy. “We’ll transform this place, for a hundred miles in every direction. Our dam will be a force of nature.” Thornburgh predicts.

In a twisted way, Thornburgh’s prediction comes true—the dam certainly “transforms” Port Bonita, the fictional town on the river’s banks, but not in the way that Thornburgh intended.

Fast forward to 2006, and Port Bonitans are struggling. Fishing, once a thriving business in town, is no longer a viable industry—the dam has seen to that. The town’s commercial fish processing plants serially shut down and only one lonely one is left to go on. Nevertheless Port Bonitans remain hopeful as they celebrate their heritage and look forward to the dam becoming a thing of the past soon. A poster around town perhaps says it best:

“Dam Days, September 2-3
Come celebrate over 100 years of Port Bonita history!
Featuring Live Music, Logging Competition, Chainsaw Carving Contest, and World-Famous Salmon Bake
Proudly presented in part by your neighbors at Wal-Mart.

It is at this “Dam Days” event that Jared Thornburgh, the manager of the fish processing plant, is expected to give the keynote speech. Jared, a descendant of the ambitious Ethan Thornburgh, has none of his predecessor’s fire. Instead his life is in mid-life stasis, consumed wholly by everyday trivialities. Forever bogged down by the weight of history, Jared worries he never quite measures up to the family name. “He forever lived in the shadow of this obsolete dam, his fortune linked inextricably to its hulking existence, its legacy of ecological menace,” Evison writes.

The novel moves back and forth between two times—the relatively recent present set in 2006 and the past set in 1890. A whole assorted set of characters populates each time period. Evison tries hard—sometimes too hard—to create characters in 2006 that are analogous to ones in the past. So it is that there’s an ex-convict Timmon Tillman who traces the same treacherous path along the Olympic National Park, that James Mather, an adventurous pioneer once did.

Native Americans, especially members of the Klallam tribe, also populate these pages as they too try to adapt to a changing landscape.

Evison traverses a lot of ground in this hefty novel and given its length it is remarkably well edited. The problem with West of Here is that it ultimately can’t move beyond its cast of characters to look at the wider picture and explore complexities. Evison loses the forest for the trees. As the book winds down, the “happily ever after” ending seems pat especially given the interesting complexities each of the characters started out with. It’s almost as if Evison finally ran out of steam and decided to wrap it all up with a neat bow. Notwithstanding this, West of Here truly transports the reader and lovers of a meaty story will really take to the novel.

In his “Dam Days” address, Jared Thornburgh echoes the words of his predecessor when he describes Port Bonita as “not an address, after all, not even a place, but a spirit, an essence, a pulse—a future still unfolding.”   For all the pep talk, Jared Thornburgh might be papering over the truth. After all, one might wonder, what kind of future does it portend when the only two times that someone from Port Bonita actually managed a modicum of success, was when each broke free?

As the residents of Port Bonita learn, some essential truths remain unchanged over centuries. “Can we really be whoever we want to be, now that we’ve collected all that we are?” asks one of the characters in the novel. The answer to that essential question is “Maybe.” Which, as it turns out, is still the same answer in 2006 as it was in 1890. Nevertheless, that answer carries with it some measure of hope—and that just might be enough for the hearty Port Bonitans.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 92 readers
PUBLISHER: Algonquin Books (February 15, 2011)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Jonathan Evison
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More novels set in the Pacific Northwest:

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]]> /2011/west-of-here-by-jonathan-evison/feed/ 2 THE TERROR OF LIVING by Urban Waite /2011/the-terror-of-living-by-urban-waite/ /2011/the-terror-of-living-by-urban-waite/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:23:51 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=15976 Book Quote:

“…he was aware he’d become someone he no longer recognized, someone terrible, something drawn up from the deep abyss, with no real purpose, an unquenchable thirst, a bottomless hunger, searching out some demon inside him.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 7, 2011)

A provocative thriller will fasten a reader to the proverbial edge of the seat, either by laying a trail of clues to “whodunit” or leading us on a mad and oscillating cat-and-mouse chase through the landscape of the novel. In the case of Urban Waite’s contemporary, reflective and rousing cat-and-mouse debut, I was glued to the pages of perilous pursuit and quickened by the torn and haunted rogue heroes–Deputy Bobby Drake, and ex-convict and owner of a struggling horse farm, Phil Hunt.

There’s the law (Drake), the lawless (Grady), and then there is that equivocal and tarnished outlaw, Hunt–the name brimming with metaphor–whose reckoning is tethered to Drake’s by plaited doubts and dark obstacles reaching back to a coiled and inextricable past. In short, they are each other’s nemesis. The wives in this story are resolute and strong, providing a mirror for the reader to reflect on their moody tormented husbands. The northwest territory of Washington State becomes its own penetrating and terrifying, living character.

In the mountain wilderness passes between Washington and Canada, drug smuggling is a lot more challenging than it used to be, now that boundary crossing between Canada and the U.S. requires a passport and the roads are policed. Bricks of cocaine dropped from planes in the blue-black night below the high treetops and picked up by horseback, as well as human “mules” carrying condoms full of heroin implanted by ingestion, are the methods used to foil the law.

In the near-opening pages, newly married Deputy Drake, on his day off, sights Hunt’s abandoned horse trailer on the logging roads of Silver Lake and suspects an imminent transaction. He camps out and waits, haunted by memories, by the ghost of family history. Drake’s father, a once formidable sheriff, is serving time in prison. He supplemented his earnings as a drug courier, as Hunt is doing now. Hunt’s wife, Nora, is not too keen on her husband’s extracurricular activities, but their love is a firm and unalloyed bedrock that never diminishes. Hunt’s curled past as a convict is something for the reader to discover, a piece of information that is teased out and explored over the course of the novel, magnifying the psychological heft of this better-than-genre story. Hunts demons correlate Drake’s, and propel them and the story.

The plot mobilizes when Drake comes face to face with Hunt and Hunt’s young rookie in the midst of collecting the goods. Phil is a skilled horseman who escapes, but the “kid” is apprehended and suffers a gruesome fate in jail. The chase proceeds with a measured pace, hypnotic and bracing. The dead bodies pile up, thanks to the main supplier’s lackey, Grady, a former chef and sociopathic killer on the trail of Hunt and Drake alike.

Rounding out the cast are DEA agent and straight shooter, Driscoll, working with Drake; “the lawyer” (nameless) and drug deal maker; Hunt’s long time friend, Eddie; Bobby Drake’s perceptive wife, Sheri; and an array of cold-blooded, one-dimensional Vietnamese thugs. Then there’s the female mule, Thu, a Vietnamese women who lives in Seattle. The thugs and mule are necessary to the plot, but the theme is amply filled by the invisible relationship between Drake and Hunt.

I was additionally impressed by the nuanced juxtaposition of Sheri and Nora, and how they counterpoint Drake and Hunt. Phil tacitly grasps Nora’s adept comprehension of his essential nature. Drake, a newlywed, still grapples with Sheri’s judicious understanding of his confused motives. The counterpoint between the two marriages was lightly but substantively rendered, endowing the book with weighty subtext that accumulates and resounds as the story progresses. This was a testosterone-infused novel, and yet, in the final assessment, it is the women who impel their men.

Waite may not have broken the mold in this somber thriller, but he deftly contributed his own achievement. The spiritual struggle between good and bad is a conventional theme that the author probed with a fresh eye. There were a few scene contrivances to advance the plot, but they did not distract from this taut, intense story.

The prose is stark and shadowy, haunting and sensuous, weaving in the geography of the northwest so ably that I heard the wind like a susurrus whisper–and sometimes a howl–through the trees, and I lurched through the snaking roads. There are tendrils of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but less primordial, and Waite, at this juncture, is not as seasoned. But I did relish at some of the turns of event that will inevitably be compared to McCarthy’s work, and I suspect that Waite deliberately paid a nodding homage–as evidenced by the character (although minor) identified as “the kid.” Some readers may decry it as essentially formulaic, but that would be a limited view. What makes this novel stand out is the ethereal prose and the ever-strengthening bond between Hunt and Drake.

The events in this book are graphic, explicit and occasionally disturbing, but with a controlled restraint. There’s also a choice twist on the Mexican standoff. For squeamish readers, this is a fair warning that the novel isn’t for the faint of heart or for readers who abhor violence in literature. This was executed like a noir-western-opera-suspense-drama-slash-thriller fusion, with a harmonic equipoise of physical action and interior torment. The story is a hybrid brew of nihilism and romanticism, summoning a cauldron of terror and stirring it with an ache and longing for tranquility.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 34 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company (February 7, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Urban Waite
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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