The Terror of Living - Softcover

Urban Waite

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847379729 ISBN 13: 9781847379726

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2011

Synopsis

From the publishers of CHILD 44 comes the debut literary thriller of the year...

Phil Hunt is a good man whose life has led him to do bad things. In the twenty years since the worst mistake he ever made, he has done his time and been saved by the love of a woman who has always kept the faith in him. But try as he might to lead a quiet life, Hunt still needs to make a living, and sometimes that involves a return to the wrong side of the law. So it is that, during a foiled drug deal in the mountains, Hunt's path crosses with that of deputy sheriff Bobby Drake. Determined to prove his own worth and escape the shadow of his corrupt father, Drake is never off duty. Against the advice of his superiors, he sets out to capture Hunt, who must risk his life more than once for the sake of all he holds dear. As the chase closes in and loyalties are tested, Hunt and Drake will be changed irrevocably, and each must face a terrible choice...

About this title

About the Author

Urban Waite is thirty years old. He lives and writes in Seattle. The Terror of Living is his first novel.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A few years ago, just as the creases were starting to form on his chiseled face, Clint Eastwood would have been perfect for the role of Phil Hunt, a horse farmer and ex-convict in Washington State who supplements his meager income with the occasional spot of drug smuggling—nothing too dramatic, just picking up a few bales of weed dropped into the mountains, strapping them onto his horse, and riding the load back to civilization. Then a deputy marshal, Bobby Drake, whose father was also in the marijuana business, stumbles across one of Hunt’s horseback pick-ups, and though Hunt escapes their first encounter, Drake, with a single-mindedness reminiscent of Lieutenant Gerard on the trail of Richard Kimble, sets off after his man. Ah, but this is noir-tinged fiction, not TV melodrama, and standing between Drake and Hunt is a psycho-killer hit man, hired by Hunt’s drug bosses, who enjoys his work way too much (think Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear). Hunt is cut from the western rugged-individualist mold, but there is vulnerability there, too, just behind the eyes, and when he tells his wife, long-suffering Nora, that “we’ll figure this out, and we’ll be all right,” we hear the determination, but we also hear the tired resignation of a man forced to make a stand that may be beyond him. In a blood-spattered chase that winds from the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington to Seattle and back again, first-novelist Waite never eases the throttle, but even at high speed, it’s the interplay between the characters that gives the novel its power. An outstanding debut. --Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1847379729
• ISBN 13: 9781847379726
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 306