Dead Run

January 21, 2013
Florid prose and speculative dramatizations take away from the story of a brutal 1998 murder in Cortez, Colo. Journalist Schultz gets off to a rocky start with a discussion of the role of the Wild West in American culture, whose reach exceeds his grasp: “Like the land and legends that created it, the spirit of the American West is too expansive to capture in cohesive thought, yet we know it by its landmarks: individualism, excess, self-reliance, resourcefulness, impatience and, above all, freedom.” That approach—looking to invest with broader significance the gunning down of policeman Dale Claxton by three survivalist antigovernment conspirators—won’t work for every reader, and many will wish Schultz had stuck to known facts. Instead, an author’s note explains the rationale for filling in gaps “by suggesting events that seem most consistent with the physical evidence and expert opinion,” and concludes with the caveat that as “far as anybody knows, the following pages are the brutal truth.” Sections identifying the flawed and uncoordinated strategy law enforcement used in catching the killers work much better. 8-page b&w photo insert. Agent: Elizabeth Evans, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.

January 1, 2013
A journalist speculates on the true, if blurry story behind one of America's largest manhunts. In May 1998, three young survivalist types--ringleader Jason McVean, Alan "Monte" Pilon and Robert Mason--unleashed hell in the small town of Cortez, Colo. After stealing a water truck, the three fugitives gunned down police officer Dale Claxton in cold blood. These heavily armed men commenced on a shooting spree that injured several other cops before they disappeared into the desert in Utah. All three were later found dead--one nearly a decade later. Schultz does an admirable job of stitching together the slim threads of their lives and their anti-government, militialike mindset. It often seems, though, as if the author is bending particulars to suit his narrative. There are some explicit accusations pointed at law enforcement officers--Schultz strongly implies that Pilon's suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound was rigged, and every slim thread is pulled surrounding the late discovery of McVean's remains. It's unfortunate that Schultz seems determined to mythologize the crime spree in the context of "frontier justice," with numerous comparisons made to history. "The gunshots heard on a bridge in Cortez...that May morning in 1998 were echoes of our Wild West past, the sound of the gunshots first fired by Billy the Kid, Kid Curry, and Killer Miller, bouncing through the decades of legend and myth," Schultz writes. There are some fascinating sidebars about the contributions of Native-American trackers, but shoehorning in an unsubstantiated motive cribbed from Edward Abbey's classic The Monkey Wrench Gang may be the last straw. A flawed but stylistic story that uses the elements of a terrible crime to fuel a meditation on Western culture.

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February 1, 2013
The West lives, Schultz asserts, before launching into this true-crime tale of a sudden shoot-out, a canyon chase, and a manhunt that lasted for years. He means the Wild West, the West in a continual war against authority, the one still breathing behind the overlay of strip malls. This well-drawn story about three contemporary desperadoes who might have been time-sprung from a previous century will have readers amazed by how close the actions and mores are to those of the Old West. In 1998, three men in a stolen tanker truck opened fire with an AK-47 on Dale Claxton, a Cortez, Colorado, cop, on the McElmo Bridge. They shot their way through dozens of cop cars, disappearing into the canyons of the Four Corners. And there these criminals, trained in survivalist techniques, eluded the largest manhunt in U.S. history, including more than 500 officers from 51 different federal, state, and local agencies; aircraft and advanced search-surveillance technology; and Native American trackers. The three desperadoes are dead, their motives dead with them, but this manhunt story will keep the legend alive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)