In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the … still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph.
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This book is intense and brutal. I had a hard time putting it down. Drug war, assassin, 2 million dollars missing. Lots of good stuff. The part I didn’t care about were the sheriff’s personal reflections that would just occasionally enter the story. All in all, a good book.
This was a good book. It took me a while to get used to his writing style of no/little punctuation (quotation marks, commas, apostrophes etc.) I was less excited about the parts of the book that were being narrated by the Sheriff than the actual story. I was also very unhappy with how the book ended. Still, it was a good book and I’ll see the movie which is supposed to be great and dead on with the book.
Excellent—as was the movie.
Mr. McCarthy at his best. Drug deal that has gone wrong; money chasing; demonic character; fast paced and scary story. The book was made into an Oscar-winning movie.
This is very similar to Cities of the Plain, which makes sense considering that both come out of Cormac McCarthy’s attempts at writing for film. Both novels subvert many of the expectations one might have when dealing with a novel reworked from a screenplay but ultimately they lack the depth of McCarthy’s best novels. Still, a terse thriller like this probably makes for a nice introduction to his McCarthy’s style.