The Carrion Birds
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The Carrion Birds from Urban Waite, author of the highly acclaimed The Terror of Living, is a remarkable work of literary noir.
Hired gun Ray Lamar is ready to put his past behind him. He wants to see his twelve-year-old son and start a new life—away from the violence of the last ten years. One last heist will take him there. All he has to do is steal a rival’s stash. Simple, easy, clean.
But when things start to go very wrong, Ray realizes the path to redemption isn’t always easy.
A soulful tale of violence, vengeance, and contrition, The Carrion Birds is an elegant depiction of one man’s last chance to make things right.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Waite follows his acclaimed first novel, 2011's The Terror of Living, with another searing western noir. Three people face terrifying moral choices as they each wish for what they can't have: life as it was before their small border town of Coronado, N.Mex., was doomed by its dying oil economy and the arrival of a Mexican drug cartel. Ray Lamar, a Vietnam vet who still bears the emotional scars from the revenge killing of his wife and the maiming of his infant son 12 years earlier, is now an enforcer for a local crime lord. Ray's life has been sliding out from under him, and all he wants is to go back home to Coronado after one last job that goes insanely wrong. Ray's cousin Tom who lost his sheriff's job at the time Ray lost his family tries to help, but the odds are stacked against them both. Meanwhile, new sheriff Edna Kelly is trapped between loyalty to the law and her sympathy for Tom, her former boss. Edna's professional and personal defeats, Tom's anguish, and Ray's brutal tragedy harshly indict the social and economic forces that are fatally choking so much of the American Southwest.
