The Far Empty

Starred review from April 11, 2016
Federal agent Scott’s knowledge of the border country of West Texas is on fine display in his outstanding debut. Deputy Sheriff Chris Cherry, a former high school football hero who’s recently returned to his hometown of Murfee, Tex., is sure that the skeletal remains found in the desert are the result of murder, and that the victim isn’t just another anonymous illegal immigrant. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Caleb Ross struggles to make sense of his mother’s disappearance a year earlier. His only friend at school is America Reynosa, whose older brother, Rodolfo, has also recently vanished. Caleb is convinced that his father, Sheriff Stanford “Judge” Ross, whose reputation for brutality and ruthlessness are legendary, is behind it all. Judge has run the town of Murfee for years, but his new deputy’s discovery opens the lid on a whole mess of trouble that, for the first time, he might not be able to contain. Scott’s skills as a storyteller are impressive, and his tale of an ambitious young lawman has echoes of the movie Shane and the books of Cormac McCarthy. Agent: Carlie Webber, CK Webber Associates.

April 1, 2016
The discovery of a body on the Tex-Mex border fuels a teenager's suspicions about his father, the local sheriff, in this debut thriller by a longtime Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross has been living in an uneasy truce with his authoritarian father ever since his mother disappeared. His father claims the woman, whom he's forbidden his son to speak of, left him for another man. Caleb believes his mother met a violent end, and when a flexi-cuffed corpse is discovered near a crossing point for illegal immigrants, the small Texas town's new deputy, Chris Cherry, begins to have doubts about his boss as well. The book, in which each chapter is told from a separate character's point of view--though only Caleb's chapters are in the first person--eschews the tight, compact, punchy prose that a writer like Jim Thompson might have used on this material. It's aiming for epic status. But the length (more than 400 pages), the humorlessness, the inclusion of more and more plot points (drug smuggling, murdered DEA agents, the sheriff's advances on the town's new young teacher) don't add up to good storytelling or suspense. Instead, the book offers an insistent showy grimness. It's the kind of novel in which as soon as a child gets a pet, you know some baddie is going to kill it, the kind where racial epithets abound not because it's how the characters talk but because it allows the author to show how tough-minded he is. The journey to the end is almost as taxing as that faced by the book's put-upon migrants.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2016
This thriller sprawls like the West Texas land of its setting, and, like all those arid miles, it's fraught with mystery and echoes of a violent past. Strange lights appear, and a distant roaring is heard. The characters have similar creepy edges. Sheriff Stanford Ross rules his tiny border town like a despot and suppresses hints that there's something odd about his wife's disappearance. Anne Hart, a young schoolteacher, flees a past darkened by stalking and murder. The language enhances the spookiness: Ross, under a bright sun, might cast two shadows instead of one. Suddenly, the present, in the form of a big SUV, rolls in bearing two people who do not share the locals' love of mythology. Hell, as they say, follows after. Scott tells his story in a style placid on the surface and churning underneath, like water about to boil, and, when it does so, it erupts into a series of fine, violent action scenes. Does the finale really clear up the mysteries? Not all of them, but some should stay mysterious. That's their powerand part of this edgy novel's appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)