From the publisher: A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx.
As a bit of hardboiled genre fiction, Winter Counts is a bit of a mixed bag. Virgil Wounded Horse is an enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He’s a man happy to take cash off your hands in exchange for delivering a beating to baddies in need of a message. But when his nephew overdoses and almost dies, he gets caught up in a much larger and more righteous crusade against conspirators, drug cartels, and Native American politicking.
What author David Heska Wanbli Weiden does here essentially amounts to reinterpreting the hardboiled detective novel within the context of Native American life in the present day. The template remains the same, though. Virgil is aloof, grumpy, and morally dubious. He has a soft spot for his nephew, but he has complicated past romantic relationships with his inability to feel. He wants to do the right thing, but his independence and insistence on working alone often works to self-sabotage. The problem, then, is that all of this is only signaled rather than developed. Weiden constantly tells us how damaged and compromised Virgil is, all predicated on his lack of compunction for visiting violence upon others, but everything else about Virgil is little more than hagiography. He is always shown to be an upstanding guy who makes the ethical decision, cares for this loved ones, and protects those who need protecting at the expense of his own safety. Nothing is complicated here, and after an effective setup, the plot zips by without offering any twisty-turny fun, only actually demonstrating a couple narrative developments which are simply explained in exposition so that the readers know why what’s happening is happening. There’s also very little insight into Native American community or culture here, which is particularly frustrating as the premise offers all sorts of specifics that have never (or at least very rarely) been explored in “detective” fiction.
For all that, it remains an easy read with memorable (if shallow) characters. For fans of private eye literature, Winter Counts offers a pivot that many may find refreshing, and if it doesn’t fully succeed in transplanting the action in a meaningful way, it still offers something of a shift from more generic treatments.
Winter Counts is available for checkout from the Galesburg Public Library in hardcover or audiobook, as well as through ADML as an eBook.
No comments:
Post a Comment