Rain Dogs
With marijuana legalized in Washington State and Colorado, is it any wonder that the stoner crime novel continues to flourish? Birtcher’s contribution to the thriving subgenre, set in 1976, stars Colt Freeland, a laid-back Vietnam vet interested only in running his small pot business in the untamed forests of Northern California. But cocaine has changed everything, and, miles away, on the U.S.-Mexican border, the drug industry is taking a new and ugly shape, as Mexican dealers negotiate with Colombian cartels. Soon the new world is on Colt’s doorstep, forcing him to pull up stakes and attempt one last run to the Southwest. It all goes bad, of course, as that archetypal “one last job” always does, leaving Colt in the middle of a firefight between a double-dealing Mexican drug lord attempting to end-run the Colombians and the Colombians themselves. Birtcher combines a gritty, action-filled thriller with a nuanced, almost contemplative character drama in which Colt and a wealth of well-drawn supporting characters attempt to make sense of their places in a run-amok world. Thoroughly entertaining. --Bill Ott