The Carrion Birds: A Novel
*Starred Review* Advice to all good-hearted crooks who want to get out of the game: don’t do “one last job.” It won’t work. Never Does. Never. Ray Lamar, in Waite’s wrenching thriller, the follow-up to his superb debut, The Terror of Living (2011), is the latest in the thin red line of noir heroes who discover that their chimerical last job offers only a one-way ticket on the Oblivion Express. All Ray, a gun for hire working for a seriously bent drug dealer, wants is to go home to Coronado, New Mexico, and reunite with his 12-year-old son. Not happening, Ray. Along the way, though, his determination to get somewhere everyone knows he can never go opens a Pandora’s box of chain reactions that wreaks havoc on a small southwestern town, havoc that is described in such graphically poetic prose that it occasionally makes the hair on even a cynical noir fan’s head stand on end. If there isn’t quite as much complexity of plot here as in Terror of Living, that’s because this novel is an even purer distillation of noir. The Oblivion Express only runs in one direction, and there are no side trips. As Ray puts it in the finale, which will remind readers of the equally inevitable end to Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (1974), “All of it had led to this—this moment, no one but him and the pain and the pulse of the wound beneath his hand, drawing him forward.” --Bill Ott