A Promise To Kill by Eric Storey

Clyde Barr is back. After dealing with the kidnapping of his sister in Nothing Short Of Dying, Clyde Barr headed off to the Utah desert on his mare and mule, Bob. Struggling to regain his identity, he finds an old man (Bud), idling in a pickup in a ditch. Being the curious sort, he checks in on the man, guesses he is having a heart attack, ties up his steeds, and drives the man to the closest hospital. In thanks, Bud invites Clyde to dinner at his home in the Ute reservation town of Wakara where Bud lives with his physician daughter Lawana and 15yo grandson Taylor.

Bud mostly runs a small horse ranch, but being laid up, he talks Clyde into sticking around til he gets back on his feet. Lawana is skeptical of this White while Taylor easily takes to Clyde. While working the fences and shoveling manure with Taylor, Clyde learns how Lawana came to become a physician and that his father had died in Afghanistan. Barr comes to realize that he is pretty good at ranching.

A ranch comes with needing supplies. Clyde and Taylor head into town. In the tack store for horseshoe supplies, Clyde hears Native music and goes to peek. Only the drumming music gets drowned out by the roar of maybe a half dozen Harleys. Seemed out of place in a reservation town.

Barr’s next trip to town crosses paths with a couple young Ute toughs, but their Warrior Spirit fades when Jury, the head dog of the Reapers ‘club’ shows them what tough means. Clyde being the nosey sort steps in and Jury takes issue.

Turns out about 40 bikers have set up camp outside of Wakara and have been raising hell in town for the past week or two. Anyone who looks at them cross-eyed gets a lesson in biker respect.

The one oddball of the bunch is a small-ish dude who looks more like an accountant. Goes by Orval. What he says, the bikers do. Tries to do nice with the Natives by being fake nice. The Utes see through that façade, but a few generations on the reservation has sapped the renowned Ute Warrior Spirit.

Did I mention that Barr’s the nosey type? He also sees things as right and wrong. And what the bikers are doing to the peaceful folks on this Northern Ute reservation is just wrong. When the Natives decide to find out why the Reapers are in Wakara, their stealth helps them learn that the Reapers have stolen something and are waiting for the pickup and to get paid.

Out on the rez, TVs, internet, and cell phones aren’t high on anyone’s list of things to do. But when driving to Vernal for hard to get supplies, the radio news is going on and on about Homeland Security essentially shutting down the western third of the country. Air, rail, and other commercial travel west of the Continental Divide has been shut down. The west is, for lack of a better term, under martial law.

Orval is joined by the Middle Eastern looking Omani. This is the real boss. He is in Wakana to collect his merchandise and make good use of it. The Natives and Clyde work out a nighttime raid on the Reaper camp to drive them out. In doing so, Clyde realizes that the semi at the camp contains Omani’s merchandise. In the ensuing raid, Barr manages to highjack the semi and hide it in plain sight out in an abandoned oil field deep in the desert.

Omani, Orval, Jury, and the rest of the Reaper’s ain’t happy and begin to exact their revenge on the town. And that ain’t right, either. Barr recalls the skills that kept him alive in Africa, South America, and Mexico to lead the Natives in a bloody counterattack.

Storey packs a lot into a compact 265 pages. Barr is the modern-day equivalent of the dusty loner cowboy drifter. Looking for something, but not sure just what. He may have found something with Lawana and Taylor. Yet the horrors of his past and the destruction he reaps on the Reapers are issues that might be too much for anyone, Barr included.

Be prepared for an edge of your seat desert conflict that pits the guerilla tactics of the Natives vs. the ball busting skills of the bikers. The reckless ride through the town and the surrounding desert will keep your eyes glued to the page. This may only be Storey’s 2^nd book, but it sure reads like it was penned by a seasoned pro. You might compare Barr to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Both see the world as right and wrong. The one difference between the two is that Reacher is supremely confident in his abilities. Barr on the other hand questions his actions and motives. Questions his interactions with the Natives. Is scared to death about why he attracts danger so readily and puts people he comes to care about in lethal danger. 

I wouldn’t call Reacher out as a scarred hero. But Barr? His whole life is a scar.

East Coast Don

Nothing Short of Dying by Erik Storey

Clyde Barr . . . from rural Colorado . . . three older sisters, but Jen is a mess . . . father/truck driver ran off with a teenage parking lot floozie . . . mom had a string of violent, drunk, and abusive boyfriends . . . after high school, Barr joins the Merchant Marine as far as Africa . . . helping whoever needed help . . . as a mercenary . . . caught a boat to South America for more money as a merc . . . worked his way up through Mexico . . . last stop headed north was a three-year stint in a Mexican jail . . . back in Colorado after 16 years on the run . . . trying to straighten out his head by living off the land back home in the Colorado mountains . . . Jen calls . . . held captive . . . probably to be killed once a job is done . . . Barr promises to find her . . . and Barr always keeps his promises . . . all while carrying a ton of baggage from what he's done and witnessed.

Sounds like Jen is somehow mixed up with the head of a major new drug cartel muscling in what had been the territory of some  Mexicans. Barr's stay as a guest of the Mexican government introduced him to some pretty shady characters with Colorado connections who describe a particularly violent new player named Lance Alvis. Got meth labs hidden in the deep backwoods canyons and deals out of his younger brother's bar. But Lance has his eyes on a bigger prize that will drastically ramp up his production quantity. The bulk supply of chemicals he needs can be found in a federal energy facility where Jen works. So he grabs her and drugs her up until the deal goes down.

Barr shuffles into the beer joint, puts a few bikers in their place, and crushes Lance's brother. The bartender, Allie, has no love for the Alvis family or his kind, so she ditches the job and takes up with Barr, much to his continuing chagrin. With what little he learned, he starts heading up into the higher elevations around Leadville.

The feds pick up on him, Lance's crew of soldiers try awfully hard to deter Barr from getting any closer, and Allie turns out to be pretty handy in all things outdoors; she's not a bother and certainly not a hindrance.

Barr faces countless skirmishes with Lance's security, some he wins, other times not so lucky. But even though he seems to go 5 steps forward and 2 steps back, he is still inching closer to finding Jen and extracting a little mountain justice on Lance.

The prerelease publicity on this debut book is about the most impressive I've seen. Storey has been a ranch hand, wilderness guide and dogsled musher. A Colorado native, Storey shows us both the beauty and the underbelly of the Rockies. Apparently, as like so many authors, he'd been turned down by other (idiot) publishers and on a lark, sent Lee Child a copy of the manuscript. No sooner had he read it, that Child told his agent to sign this guy . . . NOW. Thus, Storey's first book comes out under an imprint of publishing giant Simon and Schuster. When Lee Child says that Jack Reacher is looking for Clyde Barr in his rear view mirror, who am I to argue?

Now I know that other authors get paid to write those cover blurbs on the back cover, but I also know those authors actually do read the book. And the authors offering praise on the cover are a who's who of current mystery/thriller chieftains: Lee Child (Jack Reacher), William Kent Krueger (Cork O'Connor), CJ Box, (Joe Pickett) Nelson DeMille (John Corey), Craig Johnson (Walt Longmire), Jeffery Deaver (Lincoln Rhyme). No doubt all of those characters, as well as Mitch Rapp, John Wells, Scot Harvath, and Gabriel Allon had all better agree to set a place at the table for Clyde Barr, even though Barr would probably prefer some freshly shot game sizzled over an open flame under the watchful eye of the Rockies.

When it comes to thrillers, this is the real deal, folks, so my advice is to get in on the ground floor.

East Coast Don

p.s. Thanks again to the good folks at Simon and Schuster for the advance copy.  Available August 16, 2016.