The Marauders by Tom Cooper

 

This is the first book I've read in a while that aimed for "kaleidoscopic" and didn't hit "muddled" or worse. It's not a great novel, but all--OK, most--of the story-threads do kinda come together to make a something like a broad story. It's a novel full of rage, and given what the bayous and the people in them have been through--some of which was more like scabs than scars when this book was written--that anger is honestly come by. Most of the people in the novel aren't really pleasant, they're too busy scrambling for their next meal, or their next joint, or their next paycheck, or whatever, to bother with pleasantry, but one gets the sense the people in the novel would be recognizable to people from the novel's setting as people like themselves, or people like people they knew. The novel kinda promises a humorous caper-gone-wrong novel in the Louisiana bayous, but there's not much humor and there's not much in the way of caper-stuff, either; it's not horrible for what it is, but it's not what it says it is, I'm inclined to blame that mostly on the publisher.