Panther Gap

November 1, 2022

McLaughlin follows up the Edgar Award--winning Bearskin with the story of two brothers, raised by their father and two uncles on an isolated Colorado ranch, who have grown apart but must reconnect in their thirties owing to a promised inheritance from their grandfather. The inheritance is both illegal and a lot of trouble, bringing on ruthless criminal elements who want it for themselves. With a 125,000-copy first printing.

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February 27, 2023
This impressive crime novel from Edgar winner McLaughlin (Bearskin) centers on the unexpected consequences of a bequest. Siblings Summer and Bowman Girard have grown apart as adults. Bowman has settled in Costa Rica, where he lives a solitary existence and seeks some form of enlightenment. Summer still works on the family cattle ranch in Colorado. Then they learn that their grandfather Martin, “a minor robber baron and reputed mob associate,” had a secret Swiss bank account that he’s left them, which would radically change both their lives. But to collect, the siblings must attend a meeting at a Denver bank in person. News of the windfall may have reached Jake Salifano, a former mob enforcer and enemy of Martin’s, who believes the money is rightfully his. Though Salifano is incarcerated for murdering two confidential informants, he remains a threat, having assumed control of a prison gang and amassed “a cult-like following inside and outside the system.” Teaming up to stay alive, Bowman and Summer must evade additional dangers, including a Mexican drug cartel, to collect the inheritance. McLaughlin does a fine job making his characters’ reactions to traumatic events and perils believable. Fans of Breaking Bad will be satisfied.

May 1, 2023
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.

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