The Terror of Living: A Novel - Hardcover

Waite, Urban

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316097896 ISBN 13: 9780316097895

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2011

Synopsis

Phil Hunt is in deep trouble.

Hunt is on the run from two men: Drake, the deputy sheriff who intends to catch him, and Grady, the vicious hitman who means to kill him.

For twenty years Hunt has lived in Washington State, raising horses with his wife on his small farm. He's tried to stay out of trouble, wanting only to make a living and taking the occasional illicit job in order to do so.

Then his last delivery goes horribly wrong, and the chase is on from the mountains down into the Puget lowlands. To have any chance of rescuing his quiet life, Hunt will have to deal with deputy sheriff Bobby Drake, a good man determined to make up for his father's tainted legacy and Grady Fisher, a very bad man intent on making a name for himself in the most violent ways. With a fondness for blood, Grady takes pleasure in the use of knives, taking Hunt's life apart piece by piece, all the while leaving a trail of victims across the state.

Relentless and gorgeously written, with original characters and a vividly powerful sense of place, The Terror of Living heralds the arrival of a writer who will be compared with the great suspense novelists.

About this title

About the Author:

Urban Waite, 30 years old, grew up in Seattle and attended the University of Washington. He went on to study writing at Western Washington University and Emerson College and now lives in Seattle with his wife. The Terror of Living is his first novel.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* A few years ago, just as the creases were starting to form on his chiseled face, Clint Eastwood would have been perfect for the role of Phil Hunt, a horse farmer and ex-convict in Washington State who supplements his meager income with the occasional spot of drug smuggling—nothing too dramatic, just picking up a few bales of weed dropped into the mountains, strapping them onto his horse, and riding the load back to civilization. Then a deputy marshal, Bobby Drake, whose father was also in the marijuana business, stumbles across one of Hunt’s horseback pick-ups, and though Hunt escapes their first encounter, Drake, with a single-mindedness reminiscent of Lieutenant Gerard on the trail of Richard Kimble, sets off after his man. Ah, but this is noir-tinged fiction, not TV melodrama, and standing between Drake and Hunt is a psycho-killer hit man, hired by Hunt’s drug bosses, who enjoys his work way too much (think Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear). Hunt is cut from the western rugged-individualist mold, but there is vulnerability there, too, just behind the eyes, and when he tells his wife, long-suffering Nora, that “we’ll figure this out, and we’ll be all right,” we hear the determination, but we also hear the tired resignation of a man forced to make a stand that may be beyond him. In a blood-spattered chase that winds from the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington to Seattle and back again, first-novelist Waite never eases the throttle, but even at high speed, it’s the interplay between the characters that gives the novel its power. An outstanding debut. --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0316097896
• ISBN 13: 9780316097895
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320