The Terror of Living

December 20, 2010
Drug smuggling in the Pacific Northwest provides the backdrop for Waite's promising debut. Phil Hunt leads a quiet life with his wife, Nora, raising horses near Auburn, Wash., except when he's helping make drug deliveries through the mountains to Canada. Twenty years earlier, Phil killed a man during a botched robbery, and though he did his time, he's still serving the emotional sentence. Living in nearby Silver Lake is deputy Bobby Drake, the son of a legendary lawman who got arrested smuggling drugs just like Phil. Disaster results after Bobby, who hasn't seen the elder Drake in 10 years, inadvertently stumbles on Phil and his new partner during the middle of a drug exchange. Soon, Phil is on the run not only from the law but also a ruthless assassin sent by the smugglers. Waite eloquently depicts men in turmoil for whom the choice isn't necessarily between right and wrong but where to draw the line.

December 1, 2010

After a drug drop goes awry, ex-cons, drug lords, a psychopath and law officers play seek and maim in the Pacific Northwest in this debut thriller.

Phil Hunt, an ex-con struggling to run a horse farm with his wife, and another ex-con, a 22-year-old portentously identified only as "the Kid," are out to pick up two packages filled with 200 kilos of cocaine in a deep forest in Washington state (rendered in sensory prose that recalls Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River"). Deputy Bobby Drake nabs the Kid, but Hunt gets away. The Kid goes to jail, where someone who wants to keep him quiet about the drugs has him brutally murdered in the first of several explicitly rendered, harrowing scenes of violence. Hunt now realizes he's in trouble with the law and with the drug dealers who sent him to retrieve the cocaine. He hopes to appease the latter by carrying out one more assignment for them, this one involving a young Vietnamese woman carrying tubes of coke in her stomach. The dealers, hovering about in their car, engage a man named Grady, who has great skill vivisecting humans with razor-sharp knives. The pursuits that follow are complicated and play out in sharply written, swiftly paced scenes. But as the book's prose, its overwrought title and its violence—in a stark Cormac McCarthy landscape—suggest, Waite aims for more than a straightforward thriller. Haunted by the desertion of his father, now in prison, Drake longs for some sort of healing. Hunt, likewise, wants to know that his life, work and marriage after prison have brought him redemption. Saving Hunt, Drake feels as he circles the ex-con, may free them both.

Parts of the book are somewhat obvious. But the meticulously calibrated prose, rushing narrative and sympathetic protagonists mark Waite as a rewarding, promising writer.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from February 15, 2011

This fine novel starts with a drug-smuggling airdrop in the wilderness of Washington State, which is foiled by a zealous deputy, Drake, whose own lawman father had been involved in the marijuana business. The Vietnamese gang who owned the drugs wants answers from Hunt, the ex-con charged with handling the drop, and retribution in no particular order. Before they intervene personally, they use Grady (who has strong echoes of Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and a penchant for knives). As Grady carves his way through the landscape of the story with obvious glee, Drake feels increasingly responsible and is determined to save Hunt--another act of atonement. The action occurs against the backdrop of the bleak natural beauty of northwest Washington. Relationships are a major theme (Drake and his imprisoned father, Drake and girlfriend Sherri, Drake and Hunt, Hunt and wife Nora). The characters are well developed, and the complicated plot is well structured. The action never falters. VERDICT This remarkable debut, full of character and bleakness and written with vim and intelligence, will linger in the reader's mind long after the book is laid aside. Its visual vibrancy is sure to inspire a film adaptation.--Seamus Scanlon, Ctr. for Worker Education, CUNY

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2011
A few years ago, just as the creases were starting to form on his chiseled face, Clint Eastwood would have been perfect for the role of Phil Hunt, a horse farmer and ex-convict in Washington State who supplements his meager income with the occasional spot of drug smugglingnothing too dramatic, just picking up a few bales of weed dropped into the mountains, strapping them onto his horse, and riding the load back to civilization. Then a deputy marshal, Bobby Drake, whose father was also in the marijuana business, stumbles across one of Hunts horseback pick-ups, and though Hunt escapes their first encounter, Drake, with a single-mindedness reminiscent of Lieutenant Gerard on the trail of Richard Kimble, sets off after his man. Ah, but this is noir-tinged fiction, not TV melodrama, and standing between Drake and Hunt is a psycho-killer hit man, hired by Hunts drug bosses, who enjoys his work way too much (think Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear). Hunt is cut from the western rugged-individualist mold, but there is vulnerability there, too, just behind the eyes, and when he tells his wife, long-suffering Nora, that well figure this out, and well be all right, we hear the determination, but we also hear the tired resignation of a man forced to make a stand that may be beyond him. In a blood-spattered chase that winds from the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington to Seattle and back again, first-novelist Waite never eases the throttle, but even at high speed, its the interplay between the characters that gives the novel its power. An outstanding debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)