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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2009, 464 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2010, 464 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Kim Kovacs
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When Gil Castle loses his wife in the Twin Tower attacks, he retreats to his family's sprawling homestead in a remote corner of the Southwest, where violence is a constant presence.... Searingly dramatic, bold and timely, Crossers is Philip Caputo's most ambitious and brilliantly realized novel yet.
When Gil Castle loses his wife in the Twin Tower attacks, he retreats to his family's sprawling homestead in a remote corner of the Southwest. Consumed by grief, he has to find a way to live with his loss in this strange, forsaken part of the country, where drug lords have more power than police and violence is a constant presence. But it is also a world of vast open spaces, where Castle begins to rebuild his belief in the potential for happiness—until he starts to uncover the dark truths about his fearsome grandfather, a legacy that has been tightly shrouded in mystery in the years since the old man's death.
When Miguel Espinoza shows up at the ranch, terrified after two friends were murdered in a border-crossing drug deal gone bad, Castle agrees to take him in. Yet his act of generosity sets off a flood of violence and vengeance, a fierce reminder of the fact that while he may be able to reinvent himself, he may never escape his history.
Searingly dramatic, bold and timely, Crossers is Philip Caputo's most ambitious and brilliantly realized novel yet.
Ben Erskine
We fly from our time and place to the settlement of Lochiel, the present-day ghost town then home to four hundred souls: adobe houses and miners' shacks, a post office, a school, a few stores, and three saloons islanded on the mile-high grasslands of the San Rafael Valley and tethered to the outside world by a single road that writhes westward through the Patagonia Mountains to its end in Nogales, the road deeply rutted by the giant wagons trundling silver and copper ore out of the mountains to Lochiel's smelter, its stack leaking smoke into an otherwise unblemished desert sky.
The black tendril leans in a light breeze, and a faint, sooty mist sifts down on the tin roof of a nearby bungalow—the house-cum-courtroom of Joshua Pittman, the justice of the peace. A clean-shaven man of forty, wearing a collarless shirt and a vest he can no longer button over his portly torso, he is seated on a spindle-backed chair on his front porch, booted feet crossed atop the porch rail...
Multiple plot lines twist and intertwine throughout Crossers. The central protagonist, Gil Castle, is healing from his wife's death by creating a new life for himself on the family homestead. Author Philip Caputo contrasts the thoughtful Gil with his cousin Blaine Erskine, a lifelong rancher who seems to channel the Old West of a bygone era. Their ranch on the Mexican border is a thoroughfare for drug runners and illegal aliens. Erskine runs afoul of one of the major drug lords, who is also involved in a bloody turf war with another kingpin. Throw in historical transcripts relating the life and times of Erskine's grandfather, Ben, as well as discussions of 9/11, terrorism, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and you've got one excessively complicated book. In the hands of a lesser novelist, the complexity could be confusing, with too much happening to follow. Caputo, however, manages to balance all the threads beautifully, merging them into a rich and satisfying tapestry...continued
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(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
The primary protagonist in Crossers is the head of a powerful Mexican
drug cartel specializing in the sale and distribution of both marijuana and
cocaine.
Illicit narcotics have been smuggled across the Mexican border into the United
States for decades, and the illegal drug market in the United States is one of
the most profitable in the world. According to
The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approximately 70% of all foreign narcotics enter the US via Mexico, most of it concealed in some of the 116 million vehicles that cross the border annually. Smaller amounts are carried over in backpacks,
frequently by people paying back others for helping them enter the United States
illegally. The United States Drug Enforcement...
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