The Carrion Birds: A Novel

by Urban Waite

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062216908
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/16/2013
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	921,139
File size:	332 KB

About the Author

Urban Waite is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Carrion Birds and The Terror of Living, which was named one of Esquire's Ten Best Books of 2011. His work has been a finalist for the New Mexico and Arizona Book Awards, has been translated in nine languages, and is sold worldwide. He lives in Seattle with his wife.

What People are Saying About This

Daniel Woodrell

“A smart, swiftly-paced and bloody Western for our moment. Urban Waite is a writer who won’t let a reader wander away—he keeps you reading, and reading, and rewards all your attention with a powerhouse story and prose to match.”

Michael Koryta

“Opens with gentle beauty, calm before a bloody storm, before building intensity with swift, jarring, and confident storytelling power. . . . Readers—including this one—will certainly be following Urban Waite for years to come.”

Editorial Reviews

As in his debut noir thriller (The Terror of Living), Waite again centers on the conflicting dreams, lost hopes, and shallowness of drug smugglers. Laid-off oil workers and former pig farmers try anything for a buck just to get ahead. Ray Lamar ran drugs up into New Mexico for over ten years and was left a widower and the father of a handicapped son. Guilt-ridden and ashamed, Ray desperately seeks to cleanse and restore himself—to somehow regain the piece of himself he lost while working for the cartel. Before he can return to Coronado, NM, to be with his son, he wants to run one last job—gunning down his boss's rival and thereby enforcing the primacy of the cartel—just a couple wrongs to make things right. However, innocent people are killed. Overcome with guilt, sadness, despair, and isolation, Ray seeks a final act of revenge that might grant his redemption. VERDICT Despair and hopelessness shroud the characters throughout this violent plot riddled with countless shoot-outs and misfortune. A bleak and disquieting novel that will appeal to fans of Cormac McCarthy and readers who like their crime fiction on the dark side.—Jerry P. Miller. Cambridge, MA

Library Journal

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. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

The Carrion Birds is as muscular and laconic as anything by Cormac McCarthy, yet it crackles with humanity. A-” — Entertainment Weekly

“A lean and mean, modern-day noir western filled with complex characters and situations . . . hauntingly dark and elegiac writing . . . a candidate for best crime book of 2013.” — New York Journal of Books

“[A] 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 . . . was doomed by its dying oil economy.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Waite writes with grace and poignancy and keen comprehension of hard men in hard circumstances . . . [The] narrative rages as a perfect torrent of violence flooding toward its inevitable conclusion. Fierce and lyrical.” — Kirkus Reviews

“One fine specimen . . . with more artistry than would seem possible in a conventional thriller.” — New York Times Book Review on The Terror of Living

“In the tradition of No Country for Old Men, Urban Waite has written a nail-biter that takes off from the get-go and never stops, a book chock full of memorable characters and kick-ass writing.” — Tom Franklin on The Terror of Living

“A hell of a good novel, relentlessly paced and beautifully narrated. There’s just no let-up. Waite’s style is tight and taut. . . . Strong narrative voice, auspicious debut. . . . Awfully glad I read this one.” — Stephen King on The Terror of Living

“A smart, swiftly-paced and bloody Western for our moment. Urban Waite is a writer who won’t let a reader wander away—he keeps you reading, and reading, and rewards all your attention with a powerhouse story and prose to match.” — Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone on The Terror of Living

“Opens with gentle beauty, calm before a bloody storm, before building intensity with swift, jarring, and confident storytelling power. . . . Readers—including this one—will certainly be following Urban Waite for years to come.” — Michael Koryta, author of So Cold the River on The Terror of Living

From the Publisher

A hell of a good novel, relentlessly paced and beautifully narrated. There’s just no let-up. Waite’s style is tight and taut. . . . Strong narrative voice, auspicious debut. . . . Awfully glad I read this one.

Stephen King on The Terror of Living

Opens with gentle beauty, calm before a bloody storm, before building intensity with swift, jarring, and confident storytelling power. . . . Readers—including this one—will certainly be following Urban Waite for years to come.

Michael Koryta

One fine specimen . . . with more artistry than would seem possible in a conventional thriller.

New York Times Book Review on The Terror of Living

A lean and mean, modern-day noir western filled with complex characters and situations . . . hauntingly dark and elegiac writing . . . a candidate for best crime book of 2013.

New York Journal of Books

In the tradition of No Country for Old Men, Urban Waite has written a nail-biter that takes off from the get-go and never stops, a book chock full of memorable characters and kick-ass writing.

Tom Franklin on The Terror of Living

A smart, swiftly-paced and bloody Western for our moment. Urban Waite is a writer who won’t let a reader wander away—he keeps you reading, and reading, and rewards all your attention with a powerhouse story and prose to match.

Daniel Woodrell

The Carrion Birds is as muscular and laconic as anything by Cormac McCarthy, yet it crackles with humanity. A-

Entertainment Weekly

The defining quality of Urban Waite’s gripping existential thriller is an elegant sparseness, which inevitably recalls Cormac McCarthy.

Financial Times on The Terror of Living

Wild West noir from Waite (The Terror of Living, 2011), his second literary effort. But this isn't the Wild West of rustlers and cattle barons. It's southern New Mexico on the cusp of the second millennium, and the range war is between the Mexican drug cartel and the local drug kingpin, an ugly and blood-drenched fight that ranges across the desert and mountains and pumped-out oil fields along the border. Raymond Lamar, son of a Mexican cook and a hard-driving Anglo wildcatter, returned from Vietnam, worked the oil fields until the oil and the work dried up, and then signed on as a pistolero for Memo, a Las Cruces dealer controlling the border country. Times were hard, jobs scarce and the money good, but Ray's wife, Marianne, didn't approve. Dead soon thereafter from an apparent "accidental" car crash that left their son Billy brain-damaged, Marianne became a victim of the violence Ray brought home. Guilt-ridden, revenge-minded Ray believed the cartel responsible, and he pressured his cousin Tomás Herrera, the local sheriff, to confront the woman rumored to be the cartel's local chief. The woman was shot dead, Herrera lost his job, and Ray disappeared into the drug war's deadly jungle. Now promised big money by Memo and hoping to reconnect with his deaf-mute son, Ray agrees to one last job, wetwork that eventually leaves a trail of dead bodies along the borderland. Waite writes with grace and poignancy and keen comprehension of hard men in hard circumstances, especially in delineating Ray, Tomás and Dario, local cartel kingpin. While he doesn't fully explore the Hispanic-Anglo cultural clash muddying the flow of narcotics north, and female characters are somewhat tangential, Waite's narrative rages as a perfect torrent of violence flooding toward its inevitable conclusion. Fierce and lyrical.

Kirkus Reviews