by Minnie Apolis
On page 22, one paragraph pretty well
sums up the whole plot without giving it all away.
“With my
assorted injuries, the loss of my career, the grief and stress of
losing my father, and my having to make a decision on the ranch, I
doubted my life could get more complicated or out of my control.
“Famous last
words.”
(Note the foreshadowing there.)
Fictional stories with an Iraq vet are
pretty scarce, and those with a female military veteran are almost
non-existent. So for Lori Armstrong to start a series of novels in
2010 with such a female protagonist was pretty gutsy and risky.
Main character Mercy is on leave from
the armed forces with an eye injury that precludes continuing in her
specialty. She returns home to a family ranch in western South Dakota
after the death of her father (her mother had died accidentally years
earlier, another family tragedy seen in flashbacks).
Sibling friction with sister Hope, who
is viewed as something of a flake or non-achiever, provides another
layer of plot, but secretly I hoped that sister Hope would be offed
pretty quickly so we'd be done with all that sister cr*p.
No such luck.
While out on target practice, Mercy is
waylaid by some sweet-talking realtor who opines that he'd like to
see the ranch preserved for its historical import to the community –
while she sees right through that. Mercy can see that when he talks
about dividing it up into 500-acre starter ranches for young couples,
that it ain't gonna work. Five hundred acres in dry country will not
support a herd that will support a family.
So what he is really proposing is
developing “hobby ranches” where wealthy folks can play cowboy
and pretend to be roughing it while sitting air-conditioned
half-million-dollar housing.
That deal was a no-go as far as Mercy
was concerned. Lucky she's the one in charge of what the future of
the ranch will be, and she is nobody's fool.
Hers is a family marked by tragedy. Her
mother died when Mercy was a child, killed by a panicked
Thoroughbred. Ever since, the trauma of finding her mother dead has
prevented her from ever riding again – until forced to do so to
deliver a ransom package in the final scenes of the novel.
The younger sister accidentally killed
a playmate in a gun accident. She is forever after labeled crazy.
A family friend begs Mercy to solve the
murder of her son, a friend of Mercy's nephew, Levi. The friend's
trust is mainly based in the fact that Mercy's father had been the
local sheriff. Her father had hand-picked his successor, Dawson, who
had yet to win over the locals as far as convincing them of his
effectiveness.
Mercy seems to spend a lot more time in
bars getting hammered than in hammering away at the suspects till
they crack and spill the beans. In one such incident, she winds up
spending the night with a stranger, and another night with the
sheriff. Woo-ha, this girl is cruising for an emotional bruising.
In only one incident of her threatening
another resident, is she taken into custody – not at all realistic,
dear readers.
Another sour note in the plot involves
her dear sister going into the hospital with a concussion, yet Mercy
does not visit her even once while she is in the hospital. This lapse
is not addressed in the novel.
So anyway, while Mercy's skills as a
markswoman are admittedly impressive, her chops as a would-be shamus
leave something to be desired. She questions two young people
involved in a local young warriors group, who supposedly work on
reviving tribal rituals and traditions – but the two interviews are
widely spaced in the novel, with lots of drinking and sorting out
family secrets and fighting off land developers in between.
There are lots of threads in the
novel's fabric: sibling history, family tragedies, war flashbacks
that plague Mercy's dreams, the pressure from developers who would
mean displacing whole communities as the land got too valuable to
hold onto, unraveling family secrets, and overcoming a personal
phobia about horses. A bit too much bitten off by the author to chew
properly, in my humble opinion. But an interesting stew from which
further novels draw upon.
The main character, Mercy, is a bit too
troubled, cynical, sarcastic, and raw of nerve to want for your very
own BFF, but I suppose she will do as a multi-layered protagonist.
NO MERCY, by Lori Armstrong, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 2010, 305 pages. ISBN 9781416590958.
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