OPINION:
NOTHING SHORT OF DYING
By Erik Storey
Scribner, $26, 320 pages
“Nothing Short of Dying” is probably the best debut thriller of the year — and don’t be surprised if before long Erik Storey ranks among the giants of the thriller genre.
That’s the consensus of such current giants as Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Jeffery Deaver, C.J. Box and William Kent Krueger, each of whom has heaped highest praise upon this book and its author.
Erik Storey’s personal story is also helping drive the great buzz now surrounding him — a ranch hand, wilderness guide, dogsled musher and hunter suddenly hitting it big with his dream-come-true new career as a thriller writer.
His checking account was down to $9 the day he drove from his home into the nearest town, Rifle, Colorado (pop. 9,000), to mail his manuscript to London to literary agent Darley Anderson. That agent only accepts new submissions by mail, unlike the 50 agents and publishers who had already rejected his email submissions.
Erik Storey, now 38, and his wife Stephanie and their two young daughters were living paycheck to paycheck, her income as an elementary school teacher being the more dependable share, his being erratic because he worked seasonal jobs. But the renowned literary agent loved what he saw and the novice novelist received an impressive advance against royalties from a major publisher. That it was also a rare two-book contract guarantees that probably early next summer readers will be following a second intriguing adventure of Erik Storey’s protagonist Clyde Barr in what will likely be a long series.
“Nothing Short of Dying” opens with Clyde Barr anxious to begin life anew, free after having been wrongfully imprisoned in a Juarez, Mexico, jail the past three years. Before that he had been a loner/drifter wandering about some of the world’s least desirable places, mostly as a soldier-of-fortune. This tough-as-tough-gets big guy whose speed and lethal skills seem without equal has had it with violence, death and destruction. He craves a quiet life in the wilderness living off the land, which is why upon release he headed straight to the Utah wilderness and is set to move on to the Yukon where he plans “to live in peace and cold.”
As he savors sitting by his evening campfire getting ready to cook steaks from the mule deer he shot this day, he receives a frantic call from his sister Jen desperately pleading that he come rescue her. She makes him promise that he will. As he’s asking her where she is he hears a male voice and the phone goes dead. He has no idea where she is or who has kidnapped her.
As adolescents sharing horrors inflicted by the boyfriends of their dysfunctional mother, one of whom brutally murdered her, Clyde had always protected Jen. His sister knows that, “If I gave my word nothing short of dying would stop me.”
The nerve-wracking, nail-biting quest upon which he then embarks brings him perilously close to dying a few times while others are not so lucky.
It’s been 16 years since he left the area of Colorado in which he grew up and that’s where he begins his search. His and Jen’s two straitlaced sisters had always viewed Clyde and Jen as troublemakers and rebuff Clyde, wanting nothing to do with either one of them. But an old high school buddy points him to a seedy bar and its shrewd and gutsy pretty bartender named Allie who, through a combination of unexpected circumstances and scores of her own to settle, ends up as his sidekick and romantic interest.
It’s a roller-coaster of a read, fast-paced with surprising twists and turns, as Clyde finds himself plunging deeper and deeper into the middle of a conflict for drug distribution dominance. He’s pitted against a ruthless sociopathic madman named Lance Alvis and his gang. And he knows that this man who holds his sister captive once had three rival drug dealer nailed to crosses in Albuquerque and is willing to do anything to win.
The only help he has with him as he executes his plan to get past security surrounding the drug lord’s remote wilderness hideout and rescue his sister are Allie, whose ticket to being allowed along despite all his concerns is that she knows what Lance Alvis looks like, and his former prison cellmate Zeke, a dangerous vicious thug who’s about as scary as the mad man they’re hunting.
This thriller takes off fast and has an ever-increasing pace. Original. Absorbing. Suspenseful. Full of action. Plausible. Realistic. A very well-written work marked by truly exceptional backstory development of characters that never impinges on the action and suspense. All this plus the author truly knows and loves Colorado’s wilderness and writes about it beautifully.
• Fred J. Eckert, a former Republican congressman from New York who served as U.S ambassador to Fiji and to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, is a published novelist.
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