Review: The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (April 16, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062216880
• ISBN-13: 978-0062216885

Book Description

THE CARRION BIRDS by Urban Waite

Set in a small town in the Southwest, THE CARRION BIRDS is rife with vengeance and contrition—all while barreling toward an unavoidable finish. Life hasn’t worked out the way Ray Lamar planned. A widower who has made tragic mistakes, he’s got one good thing going for him: he’s calm, cool, and efficient under pressure, usually with a gun in his hand… a useful skill to have when you’re paid to stop people who stand in your boss’s way.

But Ray wants to move on with his life and head home to Coronado, New Mexico, to his twelve-year-old son, where he can make a new life far from his work of the last ten years. One last job will take him there. All he has to do is steal a rival’s stash—simple, easy, clean. But Ray knows there’s no such thing as easy, and sure enough, the first day ends in a catastrophic mess. Now the runners who have always moved quietly through this desert town on the Mexican border want answers—and revenge. Short on time and with no one to trust, Ray must come up with a plan or Coronado’s sheriff will have a bloodbath on her hands.

“A brutal and gorgeous novel full of characters stuck at life’s harshest intersections, The Carrion Birds is a relentlessly gripping story that digs into the all-too-real horrors of the drug war on Mexican-American border.”

   — Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

“A scorching narrative of loss and love, drugs and violence, with deep moral complexity and palpable longing, I devoured this amazing novel in one feverish sitting, its indelible characters long smoldering in my imagination. Like the best of James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, or Cormac McCarthy, Urban Waite’s The Carrion Birds is that very rare book that manages to be effortlessly entertaining, thought provoking, and deeply moving. This is a book and an author I greatly admire.”

   — Alan Heathcock, author of Volt

“[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)

About the Author

Urban Waite is the author of The Terror of Living, named one of Esquire's Ten Best Books of 2011. His short fiction has appeared in the Best of the West 2009 anthology, the Southern Review, and other journals. He has degrees from the University of Washington, Western Washington University, and Emerson College. He lives in Seattle with his wife.

My Review

 I discovered author Urban Waite with his debut novel The Terror of Living which is a compelling read.  The Carrion Birds is a dark journey to dying town.  Set is a dusty New Mexico border town that is losing its economic base - the oil industry.  What fills the gap of course is drug money.  Cartel drug money that brings its violence with it .  A good story filled with interesting characters and a vengeance filled plot. 

I recommend this contemporary thriller by Urban Waite.