Red Rover

Ms. McNamer has captured the essence of Montana life this last half century as few have. Her descriptions of the landscape, the concerns, the daily dialogue of its residents, the general diaspora of its citizens rings incredibly truly fascinating. Her word power is exquisite. To read this story is like having a long overdue conversation with a well loved, long lost friend. The story is fascinating. It is not an edge of your seat thriller but rather an enticing opportunity to immerse yourself in a challenging and often subtle slew of events. Having spent my teen years in Butte, I can vouch safe for the authenticity of the story regarding setting and characters. I enjoyed this book immensely. I sure hope the author keeps more coming.

The end-flap of the dust jacket on this book relates a storyline extracted from it that sounds straightforward enough, but McNamer has written something far more complex and fascinating. She tells a story with a beginning, middle and an end, but not at all in that order. While the narrative is set almost entirely in Montana, timelines jump back and forth between 1927, 1939, 1944-46, and 2003. There's an extensive catalog of characters who get their time on center stage, their stories sometimes overlapping with others. Meanwhile, the supposed central characters disappear for long periods of time and we learn about them only indirectly. Sounds maybe complicated, but I found the novel absorbing from beginning to end. Part of that owes to the subject matter. Two G-men employed by J. Edgar Hoover's wartime FBI start out as friends, and then something happens that sets them at odds. A young brother outlives his older brother by more than 50 years, but memory continues to bind them together. And in what seems to be a random universe, where people live and then die as if life itself were a plague, there are chance parallels like a B-29 running out of fuel as it returns from a bombing mission to Tokyo and a car running out of gas in a Montana snowstorm. Much of what makes the novel absorbing owes to McNamer's wonderful way with language, which is often poetic and haunting in its use of metaphor to capture nuances of emotion, attitude, and physical sensation. It's not a book you speed read. It's meant to be savored and puzzled over at a more leisurely pace. It's a book to get lost in; I heartily recommend it.

This gripping tale zigs and zags through the past century in Montana looking for meaning in a shotgun blast to the head and finding the deepest spot in America's heart.

I purchased this book because I am interested in Montana, but it turned out to be much more than "a Montana novel." It's an unusual mystery story, a meditation on memory, a book about what is hidden from sight in even the most familiar surroundings. The further I read, the more deeply absorbed I became, as the book shifted points of view and time frames, and each character filled in pieces that were left out from other character's accounts. I have rarely read such an unusual combination of fine, traditional storytelling and complex thinking about "the truth." It is very beautifully written, and it haunts me.

Brothers Aiden and Neil Tierney grew up as best friends riding horses in Big Sky Country. After Pearl Harbor brought the United States in to the war, they both left Montana to volunteer to help their country. Aiden became an undercover FBI agent working to out Nazis setting up a beachhead in Argentina; while Neil joins the Air Force. Both survived their WWII endeavors. Aiden and Neil return to Montana following the V-J Day armistice that ended the hostilities. However, instead of rejoicing in their safe return, Aiden is extremely ill and unable to even mount a horse. During Christmas 1946, the local coroner determines he committed suicide. Neil rejects the official ruling as he knows his sibling was a fighter and was battling the crippling disease. After the funeral, Aiden's friend FBI agent Roland Taliaferro insists Hoover will soon tell them the truth. However, the letter from the "the Old Man" director never comes and Taliaferro is retired. Over the six decades, Neil longs to know what happened to Aiden, but it takes cataract surgery to provide him the truth. One of the best historical tales of the year, RED ROVER starts with Lindbergh in 1927, goes through WW II and its immediate aftermath, and finally winds down in the twenty-first century. The story line easily makes the quantum leaps seem natural mostly because the two siblings seem real in every era they appear. Readers will appreciate this strong vivid look at much of the American century (and a bit more) while wondering like Neil what truly happened to Aiden as every conspiratorial theory will cross your mind until the closure provided with an incredible climax. Harriet Klausner