The Bitter Past

Wow, this book, by a new local author came to me from the local used bookstore so I didn’t not have particularly high expectations for it: it far surpassed my expectations. It had been sitting in my TBR pile months and started it out of a feeling of guilt only to find an hour later that I was 60 pages into a 300 page novel that I knew I was going to finish quickly.

It manages to be your standard beach-read spy-thriller with a twisty plot, a tough, clever likable hero, a sexy subplot and a scary nemesis. The story revolves around russian agent who arrived in 1950’s Las Vegas to spy on the atomic testing program and never left, now there are Russians killing off senior citizens trying to find the spy so they can return him to his homeland for punishment; unluckily for the bad guys, the first, partially skinned corpse is being investigated by our protagonist, the sheriff of Lincoln County NV who just happens to be ex-military intelligence and speaks fluent russian. Does that sound contrived? Sure, it does: to reiterate this is beach-read spy-thriller.

Here’s the thing: the story is set in the huge region just north of Las Vegas (Nye and Lincoln Counties), perhaps best known as the location of Area 51. This region really makes up a third, and the most interesting aspect of the story. Aside from giving you a notion of the nuclear testing program in southern nevada, the narrative also touches on many other aspects of life in Nevada, from proposition players (paid shill/fake gamblers) at casinos to fundamentalist LDS churches to the divorce resort at Tule Springs, there is a lot more local flavor in this book that barely touches on casinos and gambling.