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(More customer reviews)3 AcesFinally we're lucky enough to get a novel about the American road, the loneliness, the exhaustion, the police harassment, the crooked trucking company owners and warehouse receivers, and the killer storms and blinding whiteouts, written by an author whose knowledge comes from having driven those roads for many years as a long haul trucker.
And a novel about gambling, the addiction, the excitement, and the life and death dangers of playing for really high stakes by an author who has dealt craps in Atlantic City and seen high-rolling men and women broken over the casino tables.
These two stories are skillfully blended by a new novelist, Richard Ide, who waited until he had experienced life on the edge of several worlds before sitting down and giving us this story--and what a story.
It comes roaring off the pages with the power of the red Peterbuilt Model 379 with its two-hundred-and-fifty-inch wheelbase into which protagonist Abner Weaver sinks his life savings. But if Abner is driving the truck, he is being driven by memories of his time in Vietnam and the Montagnard tribesman who sacrificed his life to save Abner Weaver's.
And then there's Dawn Carlisle, who, when we first meet her as she hitches a ride with Weaver, seems nothing more than an alcoholic tramp on the run from a lousy past. But Richard Ide has a surprise for us because it turns out Dawn Carlisle is a crackerjack poker player who, well into the novel, ends up being forced into playing a game of Texas hold'em so packed with suspense and surprises that it's a toss-up who is more exhausted at the end of the game--Dawn or the reader.
But if the emerging love story of Dawn Carlisle and Abner Weaver is the road down which Ide takes us, he makes sure that road is full of detours and barricades in the person of Karl Stohner, a multi-millionaire businessman with global connections, who is truly one of the most vicious villains in contemporary American fiction and who owns the trucking company for which Abner and, later, Dawn, are driving.
Neither as rich nor as powerful as Stohner, but equally savage is Tracker, a brutish trucker driver who, along with his henchmen Slicer, Ironball, Sidewinder, and Flower Boy are bent on taking Abner's life and Dawn's body.
Finally, there is Pip, the small dog they save and who becomes their loyal bodyguard, a devotion that, in the end, costs him his life.
Ide has given us a big novel--big ideas, big excitement, big characters, and big suspense. He knows what he's writing about and he shares that knowledge with us.
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