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PANTHER GAP by James A. McLaughlin

PANTHER GAP

by James A. McLaughlin

Pub Date: April 4th, 2023
ISBN: 9781250821003
Publisher: Flatiron Books

A fractured family, secrets, and a big bag of cocaine lead to short, sharp violence in the Colorado wilderness.

This follow-up to Bearskin (2018) is marked by many of the same traits that made McLaughlin’s Edgar Award–winning debut so rewarding, not least the spare, menacing prose depicting a man seeking redemption in isolation. But while the two books’ mechanics are similar, the idiosyncrasies of the heroes here don’t inspire much sympathy, and the deus ex machina acrobatics setting events in motion fray the book’s credibility. The heart of the story lies in two siblings, dissimilar as oil and water yet inextricably tied together. Summer Girard is the reasonable, responsible one who, along with uncles Jeremy and Darwin, is holding down the fort on a struggling cattle ranch near Durango, Colorado. Her brother, Bowman, is a whole other animal, a near-feral drifter whose notions of his one-quarter Native American heritage (“tribe unknown”) combined with nerve damage from exposure to fish toxins have left him paranoid and troubled. Two precipitating events harden Summer’s resolve to keep her ranch and bring Bowman out from where he's hiding in Costa Rica. First, road-tripping lawyer Sam Hay and his pal Mac realize that Melissa, the young woman they picked up in a cafe, might land them in big trouble with a Mexican cartel over the large backpack full of coke she claims to have stolen from her boyfriend. Simultaneously, Summer discovers that her grandfather Martin has left her and Bowman a secret stash of money they can only claim together at a bank in Denver. While Summer reluctantly agrees to protect Sam when she finds him looking for water on her land, having been deserted by Mac and Melissa, a mobster colleague of her grandfather’s named Jake Salifano gets word of her inheritance and dispatches a violent, armed prison gang to take back his ill-gotten gains. Stylistically, McLaughlin’s novels recall Taylor Sheridan’s films, most notably Wind River and his adaptation of Michael Koryta’s Those Who Wish Me Dead. The prose and the setting remain arthouse cool, but the triggering menace and nominal twists are strictly B-movie material.

Breathtaking vistas and hallucinatory visions weighed down by pedestrian villainy and narrative expediency.