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Bouchercon reading, pt. 2 of ?
Bouchercon Book Club continues with Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden.
This is a bleak but vivid book set on a Lakota (Native American) reservation. The protagonist is an enforcer/vigilante/thug-for-hire who basically picks up the slack between misdemeanors (the only crimes the tribal police can enforce) and federal crimes (little short of murder is actually prosecuted by the feds). If your kid was raped, if your daughter's spouse is abusing her, Virgil is hired by the family to go beat up whoever did it. (TBH, this is a brilliant idea for a thriller protag and I love it, and I also felt the book was fair in dealing with both the relative necessity of this and its corrosive effect on Virgil as a person.) The main plot kicks in when Virgil's nephew becomes involved with heroin dealers dealing drugs on the reservation and Virgil decides to do something about it, since no one else will.
I love the immersive nature of this book. The author is an insider writing about a culture from an inside POV and not trying to make it palatable for outsiders. Lakota slang is mixed into dialogue, intra-tribal politics and the general downsides of living in an insular society where everyone knows everyone else's business are unflinchingly dealt with, and in general it's a grim but sympathetic portrayal of grinding rural poverty and the knock-on effects of racism without ever feeling like misery porn; there's an overall sense of hopefulness, resilience, and community, quite a bit of humor, and the characters are really excellent and varied, with a wide variety of ways of relating to their culture and situation - from Virgil's deadbeat but sweet friend Tommy, to his classy girlfriend whose parents want her to go to medical school and get out of the local poverty vortex while she remains undecided, to the big-city chef who cruises into town with a More Indian Than Thou attitude to teach the locals about their own foodways but is actually portrayed much more sympathetically than I expected. The characters are all very true to themselves and different from each other, and there are a lot of fun action set-pieces mixed in with more realistic family drama.
I would wholeheartedly recommend this book (with a caveat for dark content such as child abuse/death, racism, etc) except I really disliked the ending. It wasn't one specific thing but rather a perfect storm of things I generally dislike combined with things that would have worked in a different genre, or if they had been set up differently, but felt terribly out of place here; the entire climax felt to me as if it belonged to a different book entirely (much more glib, melodramatic, and flying on action movie logic) and failed to deliver on the rest of the book in a way I found profoundly annoying. Mileage varies on this - you can read a review from someone who liked it much better here! However, for me, my dislike of the ending overshadowed the rest of the book to a point I can't really get past. I can see a lot of it as first-book growing pains, and I may check out more of this author's work later on, because the parts I liked, I really did like! However, the disappointment left a bad taste.
This is a bleak but vivid book set on a Lakota (Native American) reservation. The protagonist is an enforcer/vigilante/thug-for-hire who basically picks up the slack between misdemeanors (the only crimes the tribal police can enforce) and federal crimes (little short of murder is actually prosecuted by the feds). If your kid was raped, if your daughter's spouse is abusing her, Virgil is hired by the family to go beat up whoever did it. (TBH, this is a brilliant idea for a thriller protag and I love it, and I also felt the book was fair in dealing with both the relative necessity of this and its corrosive effect on Virgil as a person.) The main plot kicks in when Virgil's nephew becomes involved with heroin dealers dealing drugs on the reservation and Virgil decides to do something about it, since no one else will.
I love the immersive nature of this book. The author is an insider writing about a culture from an inside POV and not trying to make it palatable for outsiders. Lakota slang is mixed into dialogue, intra-tribal politics and the general downsides of living in an insular society where everyone knows everyone else's business are unflinchingly dealt with, and in general it's a grim but sympathetic portrayal of grinding rural poverty and the knock-on effects of racism without ever feeling like misery porn; there's an overall sense of hopefulness, resilience, and community, quite a bit of humor, and the characters are really excellent and varied, with a wide variety of ways of relating to their culture and situation - from Virgil's deadbeat but sweet friend Tommy, to his classy girlfriend whose parents want her to go to medical school and get out of the local poverty vortex while she remains undecided, to the big-city chef who cruises into town with a More Indian Than Thou attitude to teach the locals about their own foodways but is actually portrayed much more sympathetically than I expected. The characters are all very true to themselves and different from each other, and there are a lot of fun action set-pieces mixed in with more realistic family drama.
I would wholeheartedly recommend this book (with a caveat for dark content such as child abuse/death, racism, etc) except I really disliked the ending. It wasn't one specific thing but rather a perfect storm of things I generally dislike combined with things that would have worked in a different genre, or if they had been set up differently, but felt terribly out of place here; the entire climax felt to me as if it belonged to a different book entirely (much more glib, melodramatic, and flying on action movie logic) and failed to deliver on the rest of the book in a way I found profoundly annoying. Mileage varies on this - you can read a review from someone who liked it much better here! However, for me, my dislike of the ending overshadowed the rest of the book to a point I can't really get past. I can see a lot of it as first-book growing pains, and I may check out more of this author's work later on, because the parts I liked, I really did like! However, the disappointment left a bad taste.
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The climactic warehouse shootout was so incredibly generic and cliched--as were the "cartel" guys, which I got a bit pissed off about, in fact. Like, okay, the depiction of race with the Native characters is nuanced and specific and very real--but then the Bad Cartel Guys are the most cliched, Central Casting Mexicans? Uggggh.
I have to agree about the warehouse scene feeling like the novel's author suddenly fantasizing about how it would look in a movie. I can see the lighting, the stagey setting, the boy tied up in the middle of a big open space that exists in this warehouse for no reason, the cattle prod, Virgil suddenly becoming an unstoppable acrobatic killing machine, blah blah blah. I have seen that exact scene a hundred times, in TV and movies, and it really didn't fit in this book at all.
I really enjoyed most of the book, though! The rest of it, when it was its own specific self.
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Anyway, I'm glad you came to give me your impressions! I will definitely be interested to see what else he does.
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Are there specific threads that get dropped or is it more the emotional/atmospheric follow-through?
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I was going to rot13 this, but as it's fairly long ... anyone reading through the comments, don't read further.
SPOILERS FOR WINTER COUNTS:
Most of the book takes a darkly realistic approach to the problem of policing on the reservation. The book makes a point that the characters are unfairly singled out for police scrutiny while being unable to get justice; in fact, it's a major plot point. The entire thing is clearly operating according to real-world logic and in fact deals with it fairly heavily.
Then, at the climax, the hero massacres an entire drug gang in a big climactic fight that leaves him collapsed in a warehouse splashed with blood and full of dead bodies that he's just gruesomely killed, and WE KNOW the police are on the way; his girlfriend called them.
This has no repercussions whatsoever, any more than if he had been Jack Reacher or any other standard action hero. When the book picks up again after a several-month timeskip, he's out of the hospital and back with his family and there's no suggestion that there was even an investigation about the fact that the police arrived to find him - a Native American guy with a history of violence - one of only two survivors in an abattoir that he was obviously responsible for.
And this is just one of four or five different things at the climax that had exactly this level of plot logic. (This was just the one that was easiest to explain without a lot of context.) It's not that this or any other specific point couldn't work in a different book or if it was spun differently - e.g. another of the noir books I've read recently had a bloodbath shootout climax that worked fine for me, but it was explicitly something that was handled between gang members without the police being involved. If they had decided to cover this up by setting fire to the building and arranging an alibi, I wouldn't have minded. But the implication that the police just showed up, accepted his explanation for why he obviously had to kill half a dozen people and wandered off without causing further problems is bizarre in the extreme.
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In an otherwise realist novel, I can see that!
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