Bearskin

Starred review from April 23, 2018
As taut as a crossbow and as sharp as an arrowhead, McLaughlin’s debut unfolds in the Appalachian wilderness of Virginia, a landscape whose heart of darkness pulses viscerally through its characters. Rice Moore is working as a biologist caretaker at the vast Turk Mountain Preserve when he discovers that poachers are killing bears to sell their organs on overseas drug markets. Rice’s efforts to curtail their activities antagonizes locals who raped the last caretaker and left her for dead, and—worse—it alerts agents of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, from which Rice has been fleeing for reasons revealed gradually, to his whereabouts. McLaughlin skillfully depicts Rice, revealing quirks and peculiarities of his personality that show how “his hold on what he’d always believed was right and what was wrong had grown fatigued, eventually warping to fit the contours of the world he inhabited”—a disconcerting revelation that helps establish the suspenseful feeling that anything can happen. Rice’s story builds toward violent confrontations with the poachers, the cartel, and nature itself. The novel’s denouement, a smoothly orchestrated confluence of the greater and lesser subplots, plays out against a tempest-tossed natural setting whose intrinsic beauty and roughness provide the perfect context for the story’s volatile events. This is a thrilling, thoroughly satisfying debut.

Starred review from May 15, 2018
A fugitive from a Mexican cartel takes refuge in a forest preserve in the wilds of Virginia.Rice Moore, the troubled protagonist of this hard-edged thriller, can best be described as remote, a characteristic he shares with his hazardous surroundings. He's taken a job, under a false name, as the caretaker for a family-owned nature preserve in the Appalachian Mountains. It's a slim chance for him to escape his past, one that includes a gig as a drug mule for the Sinoloa cartel, the torture, rape, and murder of his girlfriend, and a long stint in a prison in Nogales, where he trained as a sicario--a most hostile killer of men. Rice is a dangerous man, one bound to surprise the bullies, hunters, and motorcycle gangs that roam these mountains. In a very Billy Jack way, he soon runs afoul of all manner of local threats, among them the police, a suspicious neighbor, and a band of predators who have been killing the mountain's bears, removing paws and gallbladders for black-market sale in Asia. Rice also takes offense when he learns that his predecessor, a biologist named Sara Birkeland, was viciously assaulted and raped during her tenure as caretaker. It's a violent, compelling story that uses its milieu to incredible effect. Eventually we find Rice stalking the land in a ghillie suit, blinded by visions, waiting for the kill--a patience that comes in handy when he later finds himself in a desperate showdown, fighting for his life against the past that has come baying for his blood. Told in spare prose and portraying the authentic mechanics of hunting, combat, and psychological defense, the novel dares the reader to root for this damaged antihero but convinces us that he's worth it.An intense, visceral debut equal to the best that country noir has to offer.

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May 1, 2018
Native Virginian McLaughlin has set his debut novel in the state's rugged Appalachian forestland, which is as haunting and precarious as the story itself. Bears are being baited and killed on a private land preserve, and its caretaker, Rice Moore, becomes obsessed with catching the poachers, which leads him into serious conflict with the locals, who feel they are entitled to roam the property at will. Unfortunately, after both regional and federal law-enforcement agencies become involved, and Moore's former Arizona connections to a Mexican drug cartel are revealed, the caretaker finds himself in a dangerous position on multiple fronts. Moore's character is artfully revealed through flashbacks to what really went down in Arizona and through his interaction with biological researcher Sarah Birkeland. The landscape is rendered in remarkable prose that puts the reader right out on the trail with Moore in his ghillie suit, often lost in a Castaneda-like rapture that contrasts sharply with intermittent bursts of stunning brutality. C. J. Box and Paul Doiron fans will enjoy this edgy tale, with human greed and wildlife exploitation at its heart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2018

On the lam from a drug cartel after they killed his girlfriend, biologist Rice Moore has gone off the grid in Virginia, finding work as a caretaker at the secluded Turk Mountain Preserve. The forest is off-limits to hunters, and Moore's primary job is to monitor the vast acreage for disturbances. It's lonely and exhausting work but exactly what Moore needs, until he discovers a bear carcass left behind by poachers, who sell the gallbladders on the black market. His pursuit of the trespassers will shatter his solitude and resurrect the demons of a past life he's tried to bury. Other characters include Rice's predecessor, Sara Birkeland, who was forced off the preserve after a vicious attack, and a local biker gang that Rice suspects is involved in the poaching. But McLaughlin's most memorable character is the dense ecosystem of the Appalachian forest, which is explored in vivid and often dreamlike prose. These lush, hallucinatory sequences sometimes stunt the momentum of the central mystery, but McLaughlin gets it back for a violent climax. VERDICT This versatile debut is hard to pin down, successfully straddling the line between the evocative erudition of Gabriel Tallent's My Absolute Darling, Tom Franklin's Poachers, and page-turning suspense of C.J. Box. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2018

Hiding from the Mexican drug cartels he betrayed, Rice Moore works on an Appalachian forest preserve, where a bear's carcass (signaling the start of poaching) puts an end to his peace. Amazing: a debut with a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.