SHORTLISTED FOR THE ERNEST J. GAINES AWARD FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE“With this splendid debut, Steven Wright announces his arrival as a major new voice in the world of political thrillers. I enjoyed it immensely.” —John GrishamA blistering and thrilling debut—a biting exploration of American politics, set in a small South Carolina town, about a political operative running a dark money campaign for … about a political operative running a dark money campaign for his corporate clients
Dre Ross has one more shot. Despite being a successful political consultant, his aggressive tactics have put him on thin ice with his boss, Mrs. Fitz, who plucked him from juvenile incarceration and mentored his career. She exiles him to the backwoods of South Carolina with $250,000 of dark money to introduce a ballot initiative on behalf of a mining company. The goal: to manipulate the locals into voting to sell their pristine public land to the highest bidder.
Dre arrives in God-fearing, flag-waving Carthage County, with only Mrs. Fitz’s well-meaning yet naïve grandson Brendan as his team. Dre, an African-American outsider, can’t be the one to collect the signatures needed to get on the ballot. So he hires a blue-collar couple, Tyler Lee and his pious wife, Chalene, to act as the initiative’s public face.
Under Dre’s cynical direction, a land grab is disguised as a righteous fight for faith and liberty. As lines are crossed and lives ruined, Dre’s increasingly cutthroat campaign threatens the very soul of Carthage County and perhaps the last remnants of his own humanity.
A piercing portrait of our fragile democracy and one man’s unraveling, The Coyotes of Carthage paints a disturbingly real portrait of the American experiment in action.
more
With this splendid debut, Steven Wright announces his arrival as a major new voice in the world of political thrillers. I enjoyed it immensely.
The Coyotes of Carthage is at once timely and timeless, an astonishing and assured debut. Like two-faced Janus, it looks back at where we’ve been and forward to where we might be going. Steven Wright’s novel should be required reading for 2020 — or any year in which there’s an election at any level.
This lively, observant novel is a kind of national tragicomedy of manners. Once in a while an American political novel comes along that is part news, part satire, and everywhere full of jolts and wit. The Coyotes of Carthage delivers all that with brilliance and verve.
Steven Wright’s Coyotes of Carthage is a novel steeped in atmosphere and laced with menace. It’s a political potboiler masking as a buddy drama, a treatise on race and class packaged as a fish-out-of-water tale. Wright’s novel is what so few novels are: a page-turner with a conscience, a burner of a read with something to say. If House of Cards and True Detective made a novel, it would be Coyotes of Carthage. It’s a great novel and one hell of a debut.
I loved this book (with one exception, more on that later). It is an amazingly drawn slice of life portrait about a down on his luck political consultant and a very small election in a very small county…but the election is not important, really. What’s important is the constant observations of people and places, mostly people, that will astound you with their spot-on-ness. Not a word, but I can’t think of how else to describe it.
That said, however, I absolutely, absolutely HATED the ending. Or rather lack of same.
I found the story to be an interesting and engaging one. I could actually visualize the characters. Overall I liked the story. I did have to suspend my disbelief just a bit given the lead characters background. A young African American, difficult formative years, formerly incarcerated in juvenile detention, meets a woman who mentors him into a major political consulting job. Hard to believe that would happen in anything but a novel. Still a good and easy read.
I have a real problem with authors who don’t finish a story. The cliffhanger is not appropriate in a one-off book. It’s lazy, disappointing, and frustrating. The author didn’t do any research about the area in which he wrote. He very much confused South Carolina and Kentucky. I’m not saying some of the same feelings/attitudes aren’t shared, but the scenery and the people didn’t ring true.
The worst part was being left hanging with zero resolution to each and every storyline. There were several arcs, which I love, but I don’t know what happened to a single person or story.
I’d have given one star, but Steven Wright can obviously write and he works up decent dialogue. But, he needs to finish his books before he publishes them.
Long in the tooth good first novel
Ex-con, thirty-five-year-old rising star, political consultant Toussaint Andre Ross (Dre) has just run his life into the ground with his last political debacle. His life is the pits. Dre is given a last chance at personal and professional redemption by running a dark money likely-to-implode campaign for his boss’ and mentor’s corporate clients’ scheme to get the unsuspecting, duped citizens of Carthage, a small South Carolina community, to inadvertently allow gold mining and eventual soil contamination on a parcel of pristine land with a ballot initiative slipped into the mix.
Dre is on a slippery slope: job in jeopardy, no family to speak of, mentor and boss ready to throw up her hands, fiancée unceremoniously dumps him, low-life brother dying. The two years Dre spent in juvie for a crime his brother committed shapes his life and opinion of himself as a loser. His brother never bothered with a thank you, explaining it away by telling Dre that he was better equipped to handle incarceration, so his turn-coat brother testified against Dre to put the last nail in his coffin. Dre’s negative view of himself is magnified by his being surrounded by people who are out for themselves. They stop at nothing until they achieve their goals. Dre’s allowed in as long as he helps fulfill their dreams.
Dre’s pride and self-destructive behavior negatively influence his actions and decisions. When things get tough, he drinks himself into a stupor instead of fighting for his life. Dre’s laissez-faire attitude does not bode well with the small town residents who look up to him for guidance. The campaign elevates and pays off the straw candidates, the ordinary who have little talent for organization and innovation but who can be used as pawns, while destroying the reputation of the worthy, principled opponents who cannot be bought.
Fake news. Fake websites. Fake rumors. Fake alliances. Slashed tires. Hurled rocks through bedroom windows. Threatening phone calls. Lurking surveillance. Menacing thugs. All in a day’s work.
Coyotes are symbols of trouble looming ahead. Message: Go back. Danger. The coyote represents the broken, bereft people left in the wake of this political fiasco. It represents our protagonist who skulks into darkness—a protagonist who identifies with a coyote who … I can’t give away the ending. Sorry.
Not too thrilling political thriller. Repetitious. Often ambiguous. Meandering. Unsatisfying ending. Is the goal of the campaign ever achieved? No one wants a protagonist who loses. What’s the message there?
Sorry, but this is another book that exemplifies praise for the subject matter and the author, rather than the excellence of the writing and the story. The book should have been better. Great concept, but poor execution. Yes, it’s a debut novel, but the writing should have been tighter and actions and events should bring us closer to a solution. No excuse for no light at the end of the tunnel.