Dead Man Falling - Hardcover

Silvis, Randall

4.22

73 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078670313X ISBN 13: 9780786703135

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 1996

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Helping a young woman find her brother's killer is the biggest risk wildlife filmmaker Mac Parris has ever taken, since he has spent most of his adult life hiding from the FBI and his own past in pursuit of revenge.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Mac Parris, the tortured hero of this darkly compelling story, has been hiding for 30 years, since an explosion killed his wife and child. He still hopes to find the 1960s terrorist responsible for the fatal bomb, while avoiding the FBI, which wrongly suspects him. The pseudonymous Mac makes wildlife films, sharpening his survival instincts and keeping mostly clear of people. Diana Westover, referred by Mac's only apparent friend, asks him to help find her teenage brother, Tony, whom she believes has been murdered. Diana frightens Mac?he is powerfully attracted to her but struggles to remain celibate in fidelity to his wife's memory. He accepts the case, however, following meager clues in Tony's letters to Diana. In a small community near Jamestown, N.Y., a too-well-dressed librarian and his edgy daughter lie about Tony, opening a floodgate of nasty revelations but offering no easy justice. Mac and Diana are deeply flawed protagonists, sympathetic if not exactly likable, with their agonizing secretiveness (Mac hasn't even told his parents that he is okay) and obsessive pursuit of revenge. Silvis (An Occasional Hell) draws them well, with complex interior monologues worked seamlessly into the story, and several fine passages in the woods as Mac, ever the hunter, tracks wolverines.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Ever read one of those pregnant paragraphs in the newspaper and become convinced beyond all reasoning that you knew the unidentified people it was about? Diana Westover, lapping up her morning paper, reads a story headlined ``Human Leg Bone Found in Trash,'' and feels suddenly positive that the leg belongs to the half-brother she hasn't seen in two months. The police in bucolic Ormsby, New York, laugh her off, and there isn't a private eye within shouting distance, so when a dismembered arm turns up 90 miles away, she goes to see Mac Parris, a filmmaker who finds wolverines preferable to human subjects. Mac's been in retreat from the human race, in fact, ever since a horrific encounter with a bogus activist left his young wife and son dead 30 years ago. But Diana's certain, in that inscrutable way of hers, that he's the man for the job, and together they trace Tony Jakowski to equally quiet Brazelton, where he evidently got in with the wrong crowd at the public library. Sit still through the lackadaisical, maddeningly intuitive detective work, and you'll get to watch Mac exact a lovingly detailed vengeance for Tony. It's as if Silvis (Under the Rainbow, 1993, etc.) needed to rub his hero raw before allowing him a frightful release. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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