Review - Cry Father by Benjamin Whitmer

Is this a biased review? Oh, my friend, your naivete is cute. Of course it's a biased review. Because not only is Cry Father one of the best crime novels of 2014, but I sent my hardcover copy off to the author, Benjamin Whitmer, for a signature. He even sent it back, imagine that. This is after I won the copy from Goodreads. Life is peachy sometimes. Check it:

 

On the surface, Cry Father is about Patterson Wells, who works in disaster response following the death of his son, visiting an old friend for a fishing trip. Only the friend is snorting a heap of crystal meth the size of "a shrunken head" when Patterson shows up. Patterson goes to take a leak in the friend's bathroom and finds a woman tied up inside. Things get worse from there.

 

Underneath the crushing weight of all that violence and drugs is a story about the legacy fathers leave their sons. Many of the novel's tamer moments, if you could call them that, focus on Patterson dealing with his grief. A few lines at the very end sum up this motif (non-spoiler alert):

 

"She wants to think of grieving as a journey, your mother. A mapable line that begins with loss and ends with resolution. Or, as she put it, a hole that we're trying to fill with our conspiracy theories up here on the mesa."

 

That's answered a few paragraphs later with:

 

"Nothing ends, nothing heals."

 

That pair is one of the few of the many, many quotable lines in Cry Father that doesn't involve the word "fuck." Still, its significance is apparent throughout this meth lab explosion of a novel.

 

Call it literary fiction minus the sanity, noir for the "Breaking Bad' generation or crime fiction stripped of its genre veneers, Cry Father is as haunting to its readers as it is to its characters.