BEARTOOTH, Callan Wink's latest Great Outdoors tale of morally questionable choices

BEARTOOTH
CALLAN WINK
Spiegel & Grau (non-affiliate Amazon link)
SALE $2.99 ebook edition, available now; reg. price $14.99 ebook edition

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Two brothers in dire straits, living on the edge of Yellowstone, agree to a desperate act of survival.

In an aging timber house hand-built into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains, two brothers are struggling to keep up with their debts. They live off the grid on the fringe of Yellowstone, surviving after the death of their father. Thad, the elder, is more capable of engaging with things like the truck registration and the medical bills from their father’s fatal illness and the tax lien on the cabin their grandfather built, while Hazen is... different, more instinctual, deeply attuned to the natural world. Desperate for money, they are approached by a shadowy out-of-towner with a proposition and agree to attempt a heist of natural resources from Yellowstone, a federal crime.

Beartooth is a fast-paced tale set in the grandeur of the American West.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: All y'all seem to be lovin' you some Western-set crime shows, like Costner's Yellowstone that lasted six years in a media landscape full of disposable shows. There are other series reads in this setting (eg C.J. Box's Joe Pickett books, Craig Johnson's five-year TV run for Longmire TV show and ongoing novel series) but all of those are borderline copaganda in their focus on police procedural plots, and valorization of the settler-colonial worldview endemic in the men of this family. The brothers in this story, coming as they do into control of valuable natural resouces after their father's expensive death that threatens their grandfather's stolen homestead.

It was pretty hard for me to work up much sympathy for Thad, the brother whose show of privilege leads them into the nightmare of property loss, which they agree to solve, and to restore their stolen "birthright" homestead, by doing things so far beyond the pale of acceptability that I had a lot of trouble pushing through the details to get to the ending.

Animal abuse is rife.

I'm impressed by Wink's ability to evoke the Montana setting with near-hallucinatory clarity. I could feel the unique quality of Yellowstone's air, see the special way light limns the edges of distant objects; I was a lot less excited when the poaching scenes were also evoked as clearly. Hazen, the more nature-oriented brother, still finds it in himself to commit acts I find reprehensible for short-term gain. It's almost always the case that criminals are simply bad at planning and lack foresight; that fits these brothers to a T. They're led into criminality to solve a problem they created with no shred of common sense to their behavior.

What happens is a drawn-out reckoning for the past and against the future. Their long-fled mother, Sacajawea, shows up to add her dose of unpleasantness. I expected to be more led along by the strands of family dissolution and reckoning. Their criminality, the means and motivation for it, led me to finish this short (under 300pp) tale of men acting like kids who need a spanking, in over a week.

I seldom take more than three days to finish 256pp, more often two.

Wink can write. His plotting is logical, his pace is chosen carefully to immerse the reader not whiz past anything. I wish I'd loved it by the end as much as I started out loving it.

Animal lovers are cautioned...the awful things done to them aren't valorized, but still happen with no sense on my part they were being condemned, either.