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Snow - Mike Bond
This was one of my acquisitions during a spree earlier this year of buying a number of cheap, self-pub thrillers in various subgenres that I know I like, for research purposes. Some were insta-DNFs, but this one, which I finally got around to reading, is crime/noir(ish), very fast-paced, hard to put down, and enjoyable.
Two longtime hunting buddies (former childhood friends) and their guide, all of them with serious money problems for various reasons, find a crashed plane full of cocaine while elk-hunting in the mountains. This trips off a cocaine-fueled cascade of incredibly bad ideas as two of the three (after snorting a lot of high-quality coke) decide that the answer to their problems is heading off to Vegas to sell the couple hundred kilos of a Mexican drug cartel's cocaine that has fallen into their laps. The other guy wants nothing to do with it but gets drawn into it anyway when Idiots 1 and 2 steal his truck and otherwise screw him over. Eventually the Montana state police, DEA, and a drug cartel hitman are all after them too. (One of the guys breaks his arm and spends the rest of the book on a cocktail of morphine, cocaine, and booze, which doesn't improve his decision-making any.)
This book is full of really good action set-pieces, vivid descriptions of scenery, and also escalates so fast that I spent a lot of the book being amazed that we had gone from 0 to 100 on bad ideas so quickly and clearly had a very long way to go. Part of what made it so enjoyable is that the guys, for all their epically poor decision-making and often amorality where money and drugs are concerned, are actually very likable and you end up empathizing with them as they get sucked deeper and deeper into a whirlpool made up of their own bad decisions. The main three characters all really care about each other, which makes the cocaine ripping their lives apart and driving them to the point where they're hiding bodies and literally trying to kill each other even more tragic. You can see how they could all have taken a few different turns and ended up with the devoted, loving, happy family lives that they were one step away from having and think the coke money will give them.
It also has something I'm not really used to seeing in a book of this type, a conscience that shows throughout the book in various ways, in the characters' recurring affection for each other and near misses with doing the right thing, as well as musings on (among other things) the environmental destruction of the West, the contributions of US foreign policy to the drug epidemic they're caught up in, the rapacious capitalism that led them to their disastrous financial situation, and so forth. The characters aren't let off the hook for their bad decision-making and destructiveness to the people around them, but they're also products of a culture, time and place where being eaten alive by greed is something they've both learned from the society they grew up in.
This is heavy for a fast-moving noirish thriller but in general it makes this book feel a bit different from others of its type and is generally not too moralizing, as it's mostly in character for the protagonists to think about it in the way that they do; I think the only problem I had to some extent was that the two childhood buddies were fairly hard to tell apart and tended to muse on the same topics, which weren't necessarily things that a stockbroker and a sports star, respectively, would spend a lot of time thinking about. Their POV was so hard to tell apart that I spent the first half of the book having trouble remembering which was which. The other characters' POV and general social concerns were a bit more organic to them as characters, I felt. Even the hitman hunting them has moments of conscience and a fairly sympathetic backstory.
As well as a lot of tense action along the way, it all ends up in an excellent action climax. I had just two quibbles with the way things were tied up: There's a huge loose end, unless I missed whatever clues where dropped, where it's obvious someone in the DEA is passing information to the cartel, but this is never followed up on even though there's a point during the climax when the main DEA agent pursuing them tips off her bosses that there's a leak; I very much thought this was going to lead to her death/firing/etc, but instead, that thread ends there.
The other thing is that the book ends with the deaths of two of the guys and the rather poetic-justicey demise of the hitman trying to kill the third one in an avalanche. (I would say this is heavy-handed given the obvious double meaning of the title, but the book started with "snow" in snow and it ends up there too, so you can't say it doesn't commit to the theme.) With a few hundred kilos of cocaine and the bodies of the dead buried under a ton of snow, the third guy - the guide, the one who never wanted to be involved with the cocaine party in the first place - makes off with a suitcase of money that was in the hitman's car. In terms of the book's ending, this is the resolution of his money woes, but I also feel it shows a touching faith in the cartel not to just track down the one surviving guy out of the trio in search of the cocaine (which he doesn't have) and the money (which he very much does). On the other hand, the action of the book is chaotic enough, in a fairly naturalistic way, that it's also not completely out of keeping with the rest of it that they might just decide to cut their losses there and focus on other concerns. Also, Chekhov's DEA information leak might actually work to his advantage here, since the one kinda-sympathetic DEA agent who realizes he took the money decides to let him get away with it and puts it down in her report as lost in the avalanche.
Two longtime hunting buddies (former childhood friends) and their guide, all of them with serious money problems for various reasons, find a crashed plane full of cocaine while elk-hunting in the mountains. This trips off a cocaine-fueled cascade of incredibly bad ideas as two of the three (after snorting a lot of high-quality coke) decide that the answer to their problems is heading off to Vegas to sell the couple hundred kilos of a Mexican drug cartel's cocaine that has fallen into their laps. The other guy wants nothing to do with it but gets drawn into it anyway when Idiots 1 and 2 steal his truck and otherwise screw him over. Eventually the Montana state police, DEA, and a drug cartel hitman are all after them too. (One of the guys breaks his arm and spends the rest of the book on a cocktail of morphine, cocaine, and booze, which doesn't improve his decision-making any.)
This book is full of really good action set-pieces, vivid descriptions of scenery, and also escalates so fast that I spent a lot of the book being amazed that we had gone from 0 to 100 on bad ideas so quickly and clearly had a very long way to go. Part of what made it so enjoyable is that the guys, for all their epically poor decision-making and often amorality where money and drugs are concerned, are actually very likable and you end up empathizing with them as they get sucked deeper and deeper into a whirlpool made up of their own bad decisions. The main three characters all really care about each other, which makes the cocaine ripping their lives apart and driving them to the point where they're hiding bodies and literally trying to kill each other even more tragic. You can see how they could all have taken a few different turns and ended up with the devoted, loving, happy family lives that they were one step away from having and think the coke money will give them.
It also has something I'm not really used to seeing in a book of this type, a conscience that shows throughout the book in various ways, in the characters' recurring affection for each other and near misses with doing the right thing, as well as musings on (among other things) the environmental destruction of the West, the contributions of US foreign policy to the drug epidemic they're caught up in, the rapacious capitalism that led them to their disastrous financial situation, and so forth. The characters aren't let off the hook for their bad decision-making and destructiveness to the people around them, but they're also products of a culture, time and place where being eaten alive by greed is something they've both learned from the society they grew up in.
This is heavy for a fast-moving noirish thriller but in general it makes this book feel a bit different from others of its type and is generally not too moralizing, as it's mostly in character for the protagonists to think about it in the way that they do; I think the only problem I had to some extent was that the two childhood buddies were fairly hard to tell apart and tended to muse on the same topics, which weren't necessarily things that a stockbroker and a sports star, respectively, would spend a lot of time thinking about. Their POV was so hard to tell apart that I spent the first half of the book having trouble remembering which was which. The other characters' POV and general social concerns were a bit more organic to them as characters, I felt. Even the hitman hunting them has moments of conscience and a fairly sympathetic backstory.
As well as a lot of tense action along the way, it all ends up in an excellent action climax. I had just two quibbles with the way things were tied up: There's a huge loose end, unless I missed whatever clues where dropped, where it's obvious someone in the DEA is passing information to the cartel, but this is never followed up on even though there's a point during the climax when the main DEA agent pursuing them tips off her bosses that there's a leak; I very much thought this was going to lead to her death/firing/etc, but instead, that thread ends there.
The other thing is that the book ends with the deaths of two of the guys and the rather poetic-justicey demise of the hitman trying to kill the third one in an avalanche. (I would say this is heavy-handed given the obvious double meaning of the title, but the book started with "snow" in snow and it ends up there too, so you can't say it doesn't commit to the theme.) With a few hundred kilos of cocaine and the bodies of the dead buried under a ton of snow, the third guy - the guide, the one who never wanted to be involved with the cocaine party in the first place - makes off with a suitcase of money that was in the hitman's car. In terms of the book's ending, this is the resolution of his money woes, but I also feel it shows a touching faith in the cartel not to just track down the one surviving guy out of the trio in search of the cocaine (which he doesn't have) and the money (which he very much does). On the other hand, the action of the book is chaotic enough, in a fairly naturalistic way, that it's also not completely out of keeping with the rest of it that they might just decide to cut their losses there and focus on other concerns. Also, Chekhov's DEA information leak might actually work to his advantage here, since the one kinda-sympathetic DEA agent who realizes he took the money decides to let him get away with it and puts it down in her report as lost in the avalanche.