Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2013
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. [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
"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
"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." - Library Journal
"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
This information about The Carrion Birds was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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