The Sheep Detectives is Cute but Inconsequential

 

 

 

 

THE SHEEP DETECTIVES (2026)

Directed by Kyle Balda

Amazon MGM, 109 minutes, PG

★★★

 

PG movies fall into the category of “review-proof” family films immune from what critics say¹. My take on The Sheep Detectives is that it’s a cute, inconsequential movie with a good soundtrack. It will remind you of Babe, Gordy, Chicken Run, and Shaun the Sheep with voiceovers from famous actors collecting easy paychecks by pretending to be “talking” animals. If you think too much about such movies you’ll conclude they are silly, simplistic, and (of course!) unrealistic, but who’s going to say that when wide-eyed children are engrossed in them and parents are getting a 109-minute break. Besides, you might get a lesson on sheep varieties from watching it.

 

Kindly shepherd George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) spends his evenings reading to his sheep, who huddle around and are soothed by his voice. Most of them have no idea what he’s saying, except perhaps Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an intelligent sheep who is George’s favorite. Each sheep, be it a Merino, a Shetland, a Cheviot, or a Castlemilk Moorit acts according to its breed. Twins Reggie and Ronnie, for instance, are Norfolk Horn sheep who spend a lot of time butting each other in the head. As the life of a sheep goes, this pasture has it made. Even an old Boresay sheep (voiced by Patrick Stewart) believes that sheep don’t die; they just float up and join the clouds. Heaven forbid they would learn about mutton stew.

 

The farm is just outside the village of Denbrook, which is mostly imaginary, but will remind you a bit of Darrowby in All Creatures Great and Small, though filming was done in the “Home” counties near London, especially in the Buckinghamshire village of Ivinghoe. It’s a big weekend in Denbrook, its annual agricultural fair. Director Kyle Balda gets a lot of mileage of juxtaposing the excitement and community solidarity of Denbrook with the jaded dismissiveness of urbanites chancing upon the fair. One of the latter is Eliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), a stuck-up public-school boy² pretending to be a reporter and photographer. In keeping with the rural bumpkin/sophisticated urbanite split, villagers are smiling, cordial, and sometimes on the dopey side. The town policeman Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) is dense enough to make Barney Fife look like a physicist, and Denbrook seems as if it has been peopled by Stepford neighbors.

 

Rural bliss is severely disturbed, though, when George Hardy is found dead. Derry, of course, gets the cause of death all wrong, so the sheep have to figure out how to get stupid humans to see that he was poisoned, just as they must unmask his murderer. What’s a murder mystery without a tin of red herrings? Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole) has long yearned to buy Hardy’s property as he has a secret deal going with a butcher named Ham (!) Gilyard (Conleth Hill) to combine the two flocks and sell more mutton. (There’s a scene between Merrow’s dogs and the two flocks that’s a bovine version of Stalag 17.) Once rural harmony is shattered, other suspects emerge. Solicitor Lydia Hardbottle (Emma Thompson) appears to add more chaos to Denbrook. She is Hardy’s London attorney whose job is to unseal and read George’s will.

 

Much to everyone’s surprise, Hardy is a millionaire who holds the patent on a sheep medicine called “orf.”  Young Eliot steps up to reveal he is actually George’s biological son Peter. Alas, also in town is a visitor from the United States, Molly Gordon (Rebecca Hampstead) who purports to be George’s daughter. All of a sudden, the village is afoul with sheep pellets galore. Is someone pulling the wool over local eyes? Who ya’ gonna call? Sheep detectives!

 

I again emphasize that it’s a cute movie, sometimes quite clever and sometimes a forced feeding of artificial sweetener. Stay through the credits to hear a reworked version of “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).” It was such a hit for The Pretenders in the 1980s that many people think it’s an Irish standard. I think everyone can agree it’s a great song.

 

Rob Weir

 

^1. Re: my point family films have different rules, this is Hugh Jackman’s high-grossing movie and he is knocked off early on.

^2. For reasons that go way back in history, in England a “public” school is a private school, often a very posh one.

An Old Robert Parker Book that Asks Question We Should Ask about School Shootings

 

 

 SCHOOL DAYS (2005)

By Robert B. Parker

Putnam, 295 pages

★★★★

 

Here we go again. I did a capsule review of School Days by the late Robert Parker a while ago. It’s a 2005 book about two kids who shot up their school. I decided to re-read it this week based on the news that 16-year-old Colt Gray was given life in prison with no possibility of parole for killing two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Georgia.

 

I’m not about to excuse such behavior or argue for leniency. Gray did it, admitted it, and seems to bear little remorse for his deed. Maybe the kid’s a punk, maybe he’s a neo-Nazi, maybe he’s mentally ill. I’ve no idea, but Parker’s novel made me think. In the fictional Boston ‘burb of Dowling, Massachusetts, Wendell Grant and Jared Clark took high-powered rifles into their private school and opened fire. They left seven kids dead and numerous others wounded. The did it and, like Gray, were caught and admitted the deed. Case closed, lock the doors, and throw away the key. It was an inexcusable massacre by two monsters. Close the books, heal the community, and try to forget about it.

 

Not so fast. Lily Ellsworth shows up in Spenser’s office and wants him to investigate the incident. She is willing to pay Spenser handsomely to investigate Jared’s involvement in the crime and she can afford however much his fee might be. She is Jared’s grandmother, a pillar of Dowling society, and so upright that she fails to find any humor in any of Spenser’s wisecracks. Spenser’s first instinct is to reject her offer. He tells her that the case against Jared is airtight, but she wants him to make certain and is willing to pay him even if he ultimately concludes Jared is guilty.

 

It would be disappointing if Spenser had pulled a rabbit out of his hat and exonerated Jared. He knows the kid is guilty and is going to jail for a long, long stay. Jared knows it too and tells Spenser to leave him the f*** alone. But Spenser wants to know why it happened. That’s something we seldom ask and maybe that’s why school shootings have become as commonplace as crabgrass and as boring reading a privacy policy update. Fans of Parker’s Spenser series know that Spenser is bonded with psychologist Sarah Silverman, but Parker wisely sends her off to a conference, leaving Spenser to dog sit Pearl and spend a lot of time investigating.  

 

This also made me think. The stock answer, at least from conservatives, is that the shooters were either terrorists, human garbage, or mentally ill. Does anyone stop to ask what happened to a 16-year-old that transformed a child into a teenage devil? How much external harm was done and, more importantly, who was responsible for it? On a tangible level, how does a loner like Jared acquire high-powered guns and learn to shoot them? His parents never had guns, nor did they give Jared several thousand dollars to buy them. That sort of dosh certainly didn’t come from Wendell Grant, even if (as Spenser suspects) he was the mastermind of the attack. Why were Jared and Wendell together in the first place? Wendell was an aggressive football player, came from a non-nurturing family, and was known to be a jerk, whereas Jared was a meek loner. He wasn’t unpopular among other students; he was more like a blank that no one saw. Spenser suspects that something is missing, his affect perhaps. Spenser will call in several favors and dodge dangers to find answers.

 

Spenser’s questions begin to bug President Garner and school psychologist Beth Ann Blair. Pretty good ones, yes? If you’ve never read Parker, this book comes with the warning that Spenser novels are shot through with testosterone, gunplay, the male gaze, and female libido. I will say, though, that School Days reminded me a lot of a quite different scandal. See if you can name it.

 

Rob Weir

 

Lies and Wasted Lives in North Korea

 

 

 

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2010)

By Barbara Demick

Spiegel & Grau, 316 pages.

★★★

 

The above book is now 16 years old, but my one-line review is: If there a country in the world more pathetic than North Korea, I don’t want to know about it. Nothing to Envy was a National Book Award finalist when Barbara Demick published it, but a quick check shows that its current population has barely grown since 1990. That’s due to famine and outward flight of those who have illegally emigrated from their homeland for better lives in Russia or China. That alone tells you something.

 

A pocket recap of mid-20^th century history reveals more. During World War II, Japan occupied the entire Korean Peninsula. The Soviet Union joined the War in Pacific just weeks before atomic bombs ended the war, but their troops occupied the northern part of Korea. In 1945, the U.S. and Soviet Union could not agree upon a unification plan, hence, as in Germany, Korea bifurcated. North Korea drifted toward communism under its ideological premier Kim II Sung, and South Korea into kleptocracy under Syngman Rhee, a Catholic in a Buddhist land who gave economic favors to relatives and friends. The South was, however, a far richer land agriculturally.  In 1950, North Koreans and Chinese communist troops crossed the 38^th parallel of latitude, invaded the South, nearly conquered it, and precipitated the Korean War.  

 

Only General Douglas MacArthur’s risky flanking maneuver at Inchon stopped the advance. MacArthur drove the invaders back north and spoke of using atomic weapons against China. He was dismissed by President Harry Truman, who feared atomic war with the Soviet Union. The war stalemated and, in 1953, an armistice (no peace treaty) restored the status quo. Some three million Koreans died in the conflict. Since then, the DMZ (demilitarized zone) has been one of the most heavily guarded places on earth. Sung essentially locked in North Koreans and anyone caught trying to cross the DMZ was executed. Kim II established a cult of personality and a propaganda campaign teaching that “American bastards” were their enemy, that the North Korean system was pure, and that devotion to it was the highest duty. Citizens were told to spy on each other and report all suspicious behavior. Religion was banned and owning a Bible or demeaning the Kim family were serious crimes.

 

Before Demick did her research in the 21^st century, North Korean propaganda had done its job. Industries provided jobs, per capita income, and its educational, health care, social services rivaled that of the South. Juche (devotion to the system) worked–as long as rice bowls were full.  In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. When Kim II Sung died in 1994, North Koreans mourned as if a savior had died. His son, Kim Jong II took over at the beginning of famine and economic collapse. No one knows how many died of starvation–numbers vary from 420,000 to several million–but Demick, who collected stories from those who fled, tells of people eating corn husks, bark, grass, saw dust, pets, and anything that looked edible. Industries collapsed, illegal black markets emerged, and those who something (including their bodies) to sell, paid smugglers to take them across the Tumen River into Russia or China in hope of getting to South Korea; the successful were called Kotjebi (homeless).  But even soldiers stationed in Pyongyang, the capital where things appeared better, began to question Juche.

 

Demick interviewed refugees of all sorts, including a once-patriotic mother, a woman who left first her boyfriend and then a husband and child behind, a twice-arrested orphan, a teacher who watched students die of hunger, and women who became Chinese wives. Most were from the city of Chongjin. Some who left miss their old neighborhoods, but nearly all felt they were betrayed by their government and were staggered by the wealth of South Korea.

 

Demick’s book is a walk through hell and one of the cruelest set of human rights violations imaginable. Imagine learning that Western aid saved North Korea! Kim Jong II died in 2011, and his youngest son Kim Jong Un took over. Donald Trump has both courted him and called him “Little Rocket Man.” He’s right about the second; North Korea survives because of money that went to weapons instead of food and the Western belief that he’s crazy enough to use them.

 

Rob Weir

Muckle Flugga: The Brink and Back

 

 

MUCKLE FLUGGA (2026)

By Michael Pederson

Faber, 303 pages

★★★★

 

Muckle Flugga is one of the summer’s most-anticipated novels. Written by Michael Pederson, it qualifies as his debut as his well-reviewed Boyfriends is viewed as autobiographical, as it deals with real people and Pederson is a major character.

 

Before going any further, let’s deal with the title. It’s Old Scottish by way of Norn, the ancestor of numerous Scandinavian languages. It’s the name of a real lighthouse island 3km north of Unst and is part of the Shetlands, though some maps skip it as it’s been uninhabited since 1995. This part of the world is better understood by looking at a globe. You’ll notice that Norway is closer to the Shetlands than Scotland’s capital of Edinburgh. Shetlandic culture features a mix of Scandinavian and Scottish. In Scots, “muckle” (or “mickle”) means large or much. Flugga, on the other hand, could mean insect, a craze, a fishing lure, or a bowtie! For reasons beyond my linguistic understanding, put together they mean “big steep-sided island.”

 

The waters surrounding Muckle Flugga are treacherous; they are where the North Atlantic and North Sea collide. In 1854, a lighthouse was built by engineers David and Thomas Stevenson to guide sailing ships and avoid tragic accidents. Thomas was the father of author Robert Louis Stevenson. Until it was automated, a lighthouse keeper and his family lived on Muckle Flugga, a lonely existence, especially in winter when the weather dictated supply boat schedules. Pederson employs a few novelistic embellishments in Muckle Flugga: a mysterious castle-like complex slowly going to ruin and a guest house for the occasional birdwatcher.  For the most part, Muckle Flugga and the nearby Outstack are home to puffins, otters, seals, guillemots, fulmars, and the occasional fox.

 

In the novel, it is the home of a character known simply as “The Father” and his 19-year-old son Ouse (rhymes with booze). The Father is a strict disciplinarian and hopes that Ouse will be a “wickie” (lighthouse keeper) someday, just as his father and grandfather had done. “The Mother,” as she’s known, died years ago and The Father has not recovered from his loss. Ouse is educated (homeschooling and occasional trips off island), but there are gaps in what he learned. Although Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894, but Ouse religiously reads Stevenson and carries on a dialogue with him. A ghost? Vivid imagination? “Figgie” is the only other regular on the island. She is quite pretty and captains the supply ship. She’s attracted to The Father, but he’s too blind to see it.

 

Muckle Flugga is thrown into a stramash (chaos, upheaval) with the arrival of 25-year-old Firth, a putative birdwatcher from Edinburgh, but actually a depressed young man who plans to brood at the end of the world and then kill himself. The Father takes an instant dislike to Firth, who becomes the foil for some of the novel’s funniest sequences. They are essentially Scottish versions of the old jokes about city slickers and (perceived) bumpkins. One incident involves Firth’s first encounter with Cullen skink (a fish bread bowl), and that’s enough for Father to dismiss Firth as a fool.

 

Ouse does not. Firth is a font of information about his travels and a companion to whom Ouse can show off the islands. Ouse indirectly gives Firth a reason to live. Firth detects Ouse’s inner brilliance, his painting skills, and his seldom-spoken desire to see more of the world. Given that Muckle Flugga uses this Stevenson epigraph– “…to be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”–you can see where this is going. But the novel’s mystery lies in what is not said or explained. There is homoerotic frisson between Ouse and Firth, but is this a love affair without sex? A paean to wildness? A middle finger to Father’s stern Calvinism? Manipulative opportunism? Motives are left to the reader, which can be frustrating.

 

Muckle Flugga has gathered some heavy-hitter endorsements. Author Ian Rankin called it a “fever dream,” former First Minister for Scotland Nicola Sturgeon thinks it’s an important book, and filmmaker Alan Cumming praised its “rococo prose.” There’s no doubt that Pedersen can write; though just over 300 pages Muckle Flugga has an epic feel. Pedersen is a heralded poet and brings those skills to bear in gorgeous prose salted with Scottish dialect. As in all dreams, the open question is: whose dream?

 

Rob Weir

Decades Later, Sue Grafton Novels not as Snappy

 

 

 

 

H Is for Homicide (1991)

By Sue Grafton

Bantam Books, 287 pages.

★★

 

Crime writer Sue Grafton passed away a few years back. Grafton’s father was a mystery writer, but she was influenced by Ross Macdonald, considered one of the old-school hard-boiled masters of gritty urban crime novels. She was one of the first “modern” practitioners of that genre, and famous for her alphabet murder series beginning with A Is for Alibi (1982). She made it to Y Is for Yesterday (2017), which was published the year she passed away.

 

I moved on to writers who interested me more, but when presented with a free copy of H Is for Homicide, I decided to see what I thought after nearly two decades. Her protagonist was Kinsey Millhone, variously a private investigator and an insurance fraud agent. The latter is her role in H Is for Homicide. She’s a no-nonsense woman who can pass for a working-class lout or an independent feminist. Bear in mind, though, that her feminism was of the 1980s Second Wave variety. She had no trouble telling off someone who thought they had power over her, but she was keenly aware that women could still get into trouble if they pushed too hard.

 

In H Is for Homicide Kinsey works with but not for California Fidelity (CF), which is in an uproar because its new office is VP Gordon Titus, an efficiency expert with a reputation for gutting offices and making the remaining staff work harder. Kinsey’s track record is solid, but she doesn’t report to CF; she merely rents office space and takes on jobs when she’s low on cash. That’s her current status, but she deliberately antagonizes Titus to let him know she doesn’t have time to be interviewed to see if she “fits” in the new model, which has nothing to do with her. However, when handed an obvious attempt to defraud insurance firms, Kinsey hits the streets of Santa Teresa. (It’s a made-up suburb of Los Angeles, so pick one.) She’s looking for Bibianna Diaz, a Latina, whose claim looks nearly identical to others. Kinsey teases her hair, wears cheap bling, and plays the role of looking for an apartment in Bibianna’s neighborhood–once she finds it. That alone takes detective skills.

 

Kinsey is soon paling about with Bibianna in sleazy, hand-on-women’s-butts clubs with names like The Meat Locker. It’s obvious that Bibianna’s claim is a fraud, but an LA police detective convinces Kinsey to help him break a larger fraud ring in which people like Bibianna are paid pawns. Bibianna, though, is worried about the sort of ring that brides wear. Kinsey-as-Hannah Moore learns quickly that the petite Bibianna is deeply in love in Jimmy Tate. Uh oh; Kinsey went to high school with Jimmy and knows of his brief police career. Luckily both wait for an opportune moment before getting the lowdown. Jimmy does love Bibianna–the two are secretly married–but Raymond, a Hispanic gang leader, wants Bibianna to marry him. A shoot-out outside the club in which one of Raymond’s men is killed ends up with Hannah and Bibianna in a car. They are being rushed off for their “protection,” though they are virtual hostages of Raymond, a large Doberman, and a few gang members. Raymond dotes over Bibianna and can’t understand why she isn’t as affectionate as a future bride should be.

 

Kinsey/Hannah learns how the scam works. A network of drivers around Los Angeles daily crash their “new” cars into others and make it look as if the other person is at fault. They get their insurance information, fill out forms, and use doctors, pharmacists, and physical therapists who are in on the scam. It works because most insurance companies aren’t LA-based. This is an easy nut to crack, if Kinsey can get away. Not as easy as it sounds. She can’t get use of a phone to call back up, and doesn’t know for sure where she is–certainly not a part of LA you’d want to be! Kinsey decides to get on Raymond’s good side by becoming one of his “drivers.”

 

Grafton takes us through the LA underbelly 1980s-style. The book is fast-paced, but Grafton’s “modern” detective novel lacks the bite of more recent fiction. Kinsey is a smart aleck, but she’s no Spenser. Likewise, the bad guys often come off only half as tough as they talk. As a hard-boiled novel, this one from the ‘80s has a lot of runny yolk.

 

Rob Weir

Who Will Know the Bluenose in the Sun?

  

 

 

Last weekend Emily and I saw the “Tall Ships” as they sailed into Boston Harbor. In 1976, I witnessed the first Tall Ships celebration in Baltimore, but I can’t recall much. You’d think I’d remember something like that, but Popeye the Sailor Man, I’m not.  (Toot toot!)

When friends envied me for seeing the ships in Boston, I smiled. In all truth, they’re not all that interesting if you’re a landlubber. By the time they come into close view their sails are struck because, well, they use wind power and you can’t approach a harbor that way. We could have seen them in full sail had we been on one of the Harbor islands, but that would’ve entailed arising at a time officially known as “Stupid Early” to make the 2-hour drive to a parking garage, grab the subway to Haymarket, and sprint to the ferry landing.

Plus, having seen “schooner” races, we know that sailing ships move slowly. Even “clipper” ships don’t go faster than 22 knots, which is 25 mph for fellow landlubbers. In Massachusetts, we drive faster than that in school zones. (I don’t mean nearby the school; I mean in the hallways.) I put “schooner” and “clipper” in quotes because they’re all just “boats” to me. I don’t sail, don’t like being on boats, and when forced aboard I think of all the sea shanties that commemorate wrecks. I had nightmares for a week after reading Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. The thought of being hundreds of miles out to sea is that of pre-Columbian flat-earth mariners who marked the edge of the world with: “There be monsters.”

I’m not knocking those who enjoy sailing. I do wonder, though, why so many devotees have repeated the joke about the two best days of a sailor’s life: the day they buy a boat and the day they sell it. Whadda I know? I thought that a capstan was where you hung your beanie-copter and a barque something dogs do. But my eyes tell me it takes a lot of skill to sail a small craft, let alone one of those huge boats in the distance that made me grab Emily’s hand and cry, “We’ve only got half an hour to get out of here before the pirates land and commence pillaging.”

One ship, though, made me grin so hard my ears were hidden: Bluenose II. It’s a rebuild of the first Bluenose, which is legendary in Canadian history. It was a fishing schooner launched in 1917 from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. It also raced and captured the first Fisherman’s Trophy by beating an American ship. Its crew held on to that trophy for the next 17 years, until engine-powered ships made sails obsolete. The Bluenose then plied the Grand Banks, a fish-rich region whose precise boundary between Canada and the U.S. remains under dispute.  

As you can imagine, anytime Canada bests the U.S. in anything, it’s a moment of pride. The Bluenose is commemorated on the Canadian dime, paintings, posters, stamps, legends, and a song written by Stan Rogers. He’s one of my all-time favorites. Bluenose I met a sorry fate. It was sold in 1942, was wrecked on a reef off Haiti in 1944, broke apart, and sank. No one died, but no one knows its exact location either, though many have tried to find it. Bluenose II was built in 1963, but had to be completely rebuilt between 2010-13. The steam-ferry and a catamaran between Bar Harbor, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, has sometimes borne the name M.V.* Bluenose, but few would confuse those boring boats with the real thing. (Even worse, the catamaran is infamous for its malfunctions.)

We were near the Charlestown section of Boston Harbor where Bluenose II put up its canvas to turn around. As it sailed by, people cheered and shouts of “We love Canada!” rung out. The crew was elated and began dancing and waving. It was a beautiful moment.  

Emily and I still dislike boats, though we’ve been on many.  We hope to get back to Prince Edward Island, but we will drive through New Brunswick–motto: “The Most Boring Province in All of Canada”– and drive across the Confederation Bridge. Apologies to all who love to sail, but being atop water makes me hum Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

 

Rob Weir

* MV simply means motor vessel.

 

Untamed Coast: Mystery and Thriller in Alaska

 

 

 

UNTAMED COAST (2026)

By Kevin C. Morris

Ballantine Books, 304 pages.

★★★★★

Available after 9/1/26

 

I have not yet been to Alaska, though I had an Alaskan friend when I was in grad school. She told me that it’s a hard place to live, but that once it gets in your blood, it doesn’t let go. I reckon that’s why it holds a reputation as a refuge for those who keep to themselves, value independence, and prefer to live in the rough. Still another friend spends part of her summer volunteering at Katmai National Park and tells me that words and pictures cannot do Alaska justice.

 

Author Kevin C. Morris takes us there in Untamed Coast, a debut novel that reads like it came from an experienced hand. It is at once, a mystery, a thriller tour through Southeast Alaska, women’s fiction (if there is such a thing!), a tale of missed signals and healing, and a wrong that took 80 years to resolve. Morris jumps us between three different time periods: 1938, the 1980s, and 2017. In the last of these, Marco(ni) Franco is along fishing from his boat Radio Flyer. Pay attention to names in this novel, as about the only thing Morris throws away are fish entrails before their cleaned bodies are tossed into the onboard freezer. Marco is one of those people who moved to Alaska to work out anguish of his wife’s death six months earlier. He’d be a recluse were it not necessary to interact with those at bars, equipment stores, and boatyards.

 

Morris doesn’t mechanically divide his novel into three separate periods; he trusts readers to connect the dots. The 1930s were part of the Great Depression. A man named Joe Baxter lives alone in Radioville, a communications island. His day job lies on a nearby island where miners pan for gold that will never be theirs. At the end of each day, Joe collects and tallies the gold the miners found. Security is tight and the boss’ network lets him know if anyone shows up trying to assay gold. Joe holds his job because he is scrupulously honest–until he’s not! Joe, Sam, and the oily Virgil hatch a scheme, though Joe also “banks” some gold in a unique depository.

 

In the 1980s we meet Anya, who’s not so sure about Alaska. She has known comfort, but she cut that possibility by marrying a loser. He didn’t seem that way at first to anyone except Anya’s parents, but he jumps from scheme to scheme and makes a hash of each. He has run up a large debt and convinces Anya to move to Alaska. Alas, he drinks heavily and violently abuses Anya. Try as she will, Anya can’t avoid being beaten–until she does!

The sections on the 1980s and 2017 allow plenty of space for Morris to expound upon the vastness of Alaska and its dangers. Radioville was abandoned in 1938. Bill Bryson once said of Australia that there were more things there than can kill you than anywhere else in the world. Alaska would probably rank a close second. Those who fish its waters generally pack a survival suit, but some never put them on because for much of the year the suits would not prevent hypothermia. We also read of abrupt killer storms; unpredictable calving glaciers; on-land carnivorous brown bears, and wolves; and winter snowfalls that can crush or asphyxiate the unprepared. Yet, when an old pal from Marco’s earlier life visits, the boat tour to which he is treated seems like an icy magic kingdom. By the time they enter a narrow passage near Radioville and Chichagot Isalnd, where miners once toiled, though, Marco’s friend is pretty sure that they are going to die in the rough seas, wind, and ice. Marco says otherwise, but he knows that there is a distinct possibility of that.

 

Radioville is the novel’s key. Marco once picked up an SOS on an obsolete radio band while fishing nearby, a woman calling for help. Who and where is she? No one else heard it and the Coast Guard has no reports of a distressed boat or missing person. Has the cold and grief made Marco as daft as some say he is?  

 

What a series tales Morris weaves. And weave them he does! Remember that Morris doesn’t throw anything away. A few readers have criticized the novel’s feminist ending, but I think they failed to connect a few dots.

 

Rob Weir

 

#UntamedCoast #NetGalley