no country for old men cormac mccarthy book review

Also concerned about Moss's whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there's a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who's taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. Seven years after Cities of the Plain brought his acclaimed Border Trilogy to a close, McCarthy returns with a mesmerizing modern-day western. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law-in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell-can contain.Īs Moss tries to evade his pursuers-in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives-McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.

A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road comes a 'profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered' novel ( The Washington Post) that returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of the famed Border Trilogy.

No country for old men cormac mccarthy book review