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Scott Phillips has to be giving his editors fits. He begins his career with THE ICE HARVEST, an absolutely brilliant, enthralling novel that is one long swerve from first sentence to last. It was nominated for three different awards --- the Hammett, Edgar and Anthony --- and should have won at least four of them. Phillips followed this first effort with the sequel, THE WALKAWAY. Set a couple of decades after THE ICE HARVEST, THE WALKAWAY is almost incomprehensible without close familiarity to what has gone before, practically forcing the reader to read (and, in at least one case, reread) THE ICE HARVEST. Now we are presented with Phillips's third novel, which is a --- western.
Ah, but what a western it is! This is not the West of your daddy's Zane Gray, but the West of your uncle's George Gilman or your big brother's Joe Lansdale. This is the West where violence, passion and rough justice occur quickly and without prior warning --- and often without consequence. The voice of this fine, engrossing tale is William Ogden, a farmer who, as it turns out, does not want to do his job any longer, leaving his wife and farm to the care of a hired hand while he pursues the dual occupations of bartending and photography in the town of Cottonwood.
The town, and Ogden, is forever changed by the arrival of Marc and Maggie Leval from Chicago. Marc has grand plans for running a railroad through Cottonwood and making it a center of the cattle industry. He sees something in Ogden and takes him under his wing. Ogden and Maggie, meanwhile, feel an unspoken mutual attraction at first sight, one that is given voice when Marc leaves town for a two-week business trip. Ogden's passions, and the mysterious disappearance of a Kansas City businessman, dramatically coalesce around the Benders, a rural Dutch family whose greatest and darkest secret is revealed with a violent suddenness. The results of the revelations regarding the Benders spark calamity, indirectly sending Ogden across the country only to return some fifteen years later to find that much has changed in Cottonwood, though what is of utmost importance to him has stayed very much the same.
Though primarily a western, COTTONWOOD has a fine mystery subplot as well and should be pleasing to aficionados of both genres. Given Cottonwood's geographical proximity (other than for a brief foray into San Francisco) to Phillips's other novels, I am wondering if Phillips is, perhaps, laying the foundation for a chronology of the area told out of sequence and painted on a dark, ominous and occasionally comic canvas. His next novel may shed some light on this, or not; the only certainty is that it will be worth reading immediately.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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