A Desert Reckoning

May 7, 2012
Stillman (Twentynine Palms) uses a face-off in 2003 between a brilliant, paranoid, drug-abusing hermit and a former surfer–turned–law enforcement officer, and the subsequent seven-day manhunt, to frame a much larger story of the Mojave’s Antelope Valley. Based on her Rolling Stone article “The Great Mojave Manhunt,” Stillman explores, with exquisite detail, the broken families and failed strivings of her two protagonists: hermit Donald Kueck and the murdered sheriff, Steve Sorenson. In her gentle hands, Kueck and Sorenson emerge as tragic figures who traveled radically different paths, but found their lives and deaths in the desert. The details of the manhunt for Kueck are interspersed with Stillman’s imaginings about his seven days on the run, with the desert sometimes becoming the main character. Was Kueck concealed in the hidden tunnels of the Mojave? How did he get water? Stillman skillfully excavates the vividly drawn landscape to reveal the desert’s mystical spirit and history of human striving. Soon, Stillman speculates, the building of the High Desert Corridor, a highway scheduled for completion in 2020, will “drive the remaining castaways deeper into the desert... desperados displaced one more time.” Through the lens of a gripping true crime story, this beautifully written, humane book preserves the history of a remarkable and very American place and its people. Agent: TK.

June 15, 2012
Ambitious, vibrant true-crime narrative from the dangerous deserts of Southern California. Stillman (Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, 2008, etc.) seizes on the too-common flashpoint of a police officer's murder by a marginalized individual to examine larger social changes, embodied by the unusual locale of the Mojave Desert. In 2003, desert hermit Donald Kueck shot Deputy Sheriff Steve Sorensen after a brief confrontation on Kueck's property. The ensuing weeklong manhunt was one of the largest law enforcement operations in recent history, involving local, state and federal agencies determined to bring Kueck to justice, lest he set an example for the desert's "eccentrics, ex-felons, [and] fugitives." Stillman intersperses this narrative of pursuit with chapters that offer a panoramic examination of tangential elements of the story, and this approach pays off in providing a thorough consideration of a place and character set that could be easily caricatured. One sad thread involves Kueck's son, a doomed punk rocker representative of a larger population of neglected youth in California's hardscrabble "Inland Empire." Kueck comes off as a menacing and complex figure, a struggling, antisocial dropout who was nonetheless well read, skilled and capable of kindness to others. Sorensen gave up a stereotypical "surfer" adolescence for military and law enforcement service; he'd partnered with a few established residents in the rural desert community to push back against the entropy and violence that ultimately claimed him. Stillman's prose can become heated--the deputy "was blazing a path behind a badge and a wall of will"--but she does an admirable job building a full portrait of this beleaguered landscape by looking at individual characters, including Sorensen's aggrieved fellow officers and the eccentric ruffians who compose the hermit and punk subcultures, which Kueck and his son embodied. The result is lyrical and intense, if slightly unwieldy, with aspirations that suggest influences including Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy. A dynamic synthesis of Western saga, true-crime thriller and California-based transformation narrative.

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September 1, 2012

Journalist Stillman (Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West) here expands her original Rolling Stone article "The Great Mojave Manhunt" into a book that recounts the fatal clash in 2003 between California lawman Stephen Sorensen and deranged desert hermit Donald Kueck. When Sheriff Sorensen investigated a complaint about a squatter, he inexplicably trespassed on Kueck's property, sparking a deadly confrontation that resulted in Sorenson's murder and Kueck's flight into the desert he loved. A massive manhunt in hostile, unforgiving terrain ensued. Much of the book profiles Sorenson and Kueck and covers their lives up to the tragic convergence that ended in the desert bloodbath. Stillman's research on both men is impressive, but, in the end, the complicated Kueck is the more interesting, provocative character. Particularly poignant, Stillman's telling of the tragic life of Kueck's talented son, whose death from a drug overdose was a factor in the downward trajectory of Kueck's life. VERDICT This compelling portrait of a senseless but strangely inevitable human tragedy is certain to mesmerize readers of books such as Maureen Orth's Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History.--Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.