The Outlander
Non-series
Gil
Adamson
Ecco Press (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-06-149125-X (006149125X)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-149125-2 (006149125X)
Publication Date: April 2008
List Price: $25.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): In 1903, a mysterious young woman flees alone across
the west, one heart-pounding step ahead of the law. At nineteen, Mary
Boulton has just become a widow – and her husband’s
killer. As bloodhounds track her frantic race toward the mountains, she
is tormented by mad visions and by the knowledge that her two ruthless
brothers-in-law are in pursuit, determined to avenge their younger
brother’s death. Responding to little more than the primitive
fight for life, the widow retreats ever deeper into the wilderness
– and into the wilds of her own mind – encountering
an unforgettable cast of eccentrics along the way.
With the stunning prose and captivating mood of great works like
Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain or early Cormac McCarthy, Gil
Adamson’s intoxicating debut novel weds a brilliant literary
style to the gripping tale of one woman’s desperate escape.
Review:
The International Association of Crime-Writers 2008 winner of The
Hammett Prize for Crime-Writing by a U.S. or Canadian author, The Outlander
is Toronto writer Gil Adamson’s powerful debut novel of a
twenty-year old widow’s incredible struggle to survive against
overwhelming odds - the pursuit of twin vengeance-mad redheaded
brothers-in-law, the unforgiving wilderness of the 1900s northwest
mountains and forests, and the all-consuming ravages of the Frank
slide, one of North America’s worst ever natural disasters. From
the opening line of, “It was night, and dogs came through the
trees, unleashed and howling,” to the final words, “Find
me,” on the last page of the story, and with all of the exactly
right words in between, the novel grabs and holds from first to last.
Maddened from her 34-year-old husband’s neglect, the death of her
infant son and the cabin fever of her homesteading existence,
20-year-old Mary Boulton kills her unfaithful spouse with a rifle shot
to the leg, watching his blood and his life drain into the dirt floor
of their single room cabin before taking off on a spectacular run for
her life. Through her intuition and wits the young woman,
“Widowed by her own hand,” manages to elude her pursuing
brothers-in-law as determined to catch her as she is to escape, as
Adamson shows in storyline cross cuts between the hunted and the
hunters. After an interlude with an eccentric dowager and her retinue,
Mary and the “dark shapes” of her memories and the sack of
items she has stolen, press onward to anywhere away from the twins. For
a while she finds solace and even the warmth of real love with a
mountain man, William Moreland, known to the Forest Service Rangers as
“the Ridgerunner” for his ability to raid their cabins and
evade their capture. Regrettably for the lovers, Moreland’s own
demons motivate him to desert the widow, leaving her once more desolate
and destitute and with the twins and a tracker they’ve hired
still in hot pursuit. With the help of a not-too-friendly Indian and
his gracious white wife, Mary gets to the ramshackle tent and mining
town of Frank. Here, a kindly Reverend Mr. Angus Lorne Bonnycastle -
“Bonny” to his friends and his flock- becomes her guardian
angel, and she encounters some of the Lord’s strangest castoffs
– McEchern the dwarf, for one example, who runs the town’s
trading post and, for another, Giovanni the Italian talking,
“colossal, hump-shouldered creature with a heavy head” who
supplies the town’s booze from his hidden still. Between building
a ramshackle church and converting the miners to his faith with a
baptism of fisticuffs, Bonny deals in stolen horses brought to town by
the eight Cregan brothers, the black sheep of the 15-brother Cregan
clan. And all the while Mary’s own dark avengers, the redheaded
brothers are circling relentlessly closer. But before they can swoop,
nature takes its own revenge for the underground gouges of the local
mines and hurls down the top of the mountain to obliterate the town.
While Mary escapes the devastation that Adamson describes in meticulous
detail, the photograph of the widow that appears in newspapers
nation-wide comes back to haunt her and leads to her eventual capture.
But her intuition and ingenuity rise again, resulting in an incredible
escape, a reunion with William Moreland and her final note, “Find
me.”
For readers who want a cracking good story with unforgettable
characters engaged in tension-filled activities, and told with a
superlative richness of language and a lushness of imagery, Gil
Adamson’s novel, The Outlander, is it. Her widow, Mary Boulton, and “Bonny”, her Reverend, are the ideal stuff and stuffings of legends.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of The Outlander.
Review
Copyright © 2008 — M. Wayne Cunningham
— All
Rights Reserved
Reprinted with Permission
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