The Carrion Birds

Starred review from February 11, 2013
Waite follows his acclaimed first novel, 2011’s The Terror of Living, with another searing western noir. Three people face terrifying moral choices as they each wish for what they can’t have: life as it was before their small border town of Coronado, N.Mex., was doomed by its dying oil economy and the arrival of a Mexican drug cartel. Ray Lamar, a Vietnam vet who still bears the emotional scars from the revenge killing of his wife and the maiming of his infant son 12 years earlier, is now an enforcer for a local crime lord. Ray’s life has been sliding out from under him, and all he wants is to go back home to Coronado—after one last job that goes insanely wrong. Ray’s cousin Tom—who lost his sheriff’s job at the time Ray lost his family—tries to help, but the odds are stacked against them both. Meanwhile, new sheriff Edna Kelly is trapped between loyalty to the law and her sympathy for Tom, her former boss. Edna’s professional and personal defeats, Tom’s anguish, and Ray’s brutal tragedy harshly indict the social and economic forces that are fatally choking so much of the American Southwest. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

January 1, 2013

As in his debut noir thriller (The Terror of Living), Waite again centers on the conflicting dreams, lost hopes, and shallowness of drug smugglers. Laid-off oil workers and former pig farmers try anything for a buck just to get ahead. Ray Lamar ran drugs up into New Mexico for over ten years and was left a widower and the father of a handicapped son. Guilt-ridden and ashamed, Ray desperately seeks to cleanse and restore himself--to somehow regain the piece of himself he lost while working for the cartel. Before he can return to Coronado, NM, to be with his son, he wants to run one last job--gunning down his boss's rival and thereby enforcing the primacy of the cartel--just a couple wrongs to make things right. However, innocent people are killed. Overcome with guilt, sadness, despair, and isolation, Ray seeks a final act of revenge that might grant his redemption. VERDICT Despair and hopelessness shroud the characters throughout this violent plot riddled with countless shoot-outs and misfortune. A bleak and disquieting novel that will appeal to fans of Cormac McCarthy and readers who like their crime fiction on the dark side.--Jerry P. Miller. Cambridge, MA

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