Whiplash River

by Lou Berney

[jamiereadthis]

Ten hours flat, start to finish. Ten hours and I stopped to eat lunch and to eat dinner and that was the problem! Both were food that took both hands and how could I eat but also keep reading?

If I really, really liked Gutshot Straight, I loved loved loved this one. This guy is— hang with me here— the William Gay to Elmore Leonard’s Cormac McCarthy. At first glance, he’s got Elmore’s language, he’s onto the master’s tricks. But any look closer and it’s not even close to imitation. It’s not even homage. It may be a debt owed but he’s doing something so completely his own, from his own heart and guts, it’s in another zipcode.

And this zipcode is my zipcode, you better believe it. There are Shake and Quinn who joke about Faulkner and Don Quixote and Ten Wanted Men. Baby-faced crime bosses named Baby Jesus who read The Four Hour Workweek to decide if they should shoot their gun thug for putting a scratch on their boat. There’s twists and flips and triple-crosses and I laughed out loud and chewed my nails and held my breath and got choked up until I had to look away and blink to see the page. The crackling chemistry Shake had with Gina is missing but you don’t even notice until the halfway mark and holy shit, the hot blue spark is back. Then it’s just two Evinrude motors, full bore, breakneck.

Plus this time, there’s a lady Fed with a SIG Sauer and Cairo, Egypt and Terry and Meg, my darling Meg. The plot’s a little tighter. The love’s a little deeper. There’s bullshit by the metric ton but all the earnestness a heart can hold and there’s not a trace of anything ironic or detached within a square mile. Everybody’s self-aware and badass and scared shitless and bold and smart and dumb and funny and unexpectedly deep, all of my favorite things in a person.

Like Elmore said, a sequel’s got to be better than the original or it’s not gonna work. This one proved the first one wasn’t a fluke. Now I just wish Berney’s catalog was already sixty deep so I could read so much more.

P.S. Nice with the hat tip to Ted Griffin via Shake and Gina’s bit on the writer of Ocean’s Eleven. (“The one with Sinatra, you mean?”)

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Re-read September 2013: I was going to read this a second time, longer and slower this time. I guess I did. It lasted two days. So then I tried a third time and finally did it, taking a whole week to savor the fun.

I wouldn’t even know how to explain how to push all my buttons, but boy, this sure does. Quinn and Meg and Terry and Shake and Gina! I could grab this book and pick a chapter, any chapter, any time I want to brighten my day.

It’s goddamn delightful. It might be one of the books I read most this year.