The Last Sanctuary: A Novel

by Craig Holden

At once a heart-pounding , chillingly realistic thriller and a dark plunge into the human psyche, The Last Sanctuary is the tale of an innocent man accused of murder.

When a killing is falsely blamed on Joe Curtis, a Gulf War veteran living on the edge of society, he hides in a dark underworld of armed militias and terrorist cults, running from the cops, federal agents, and from his own tortured soul. In a cat-and-mouse chase across soaring mountains and vast glaciers of Alaska, the complex relationship between the fugitive and his nemesis, a female Native American ATF agent, is rendered unpredictably and superbly.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery

432 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1996

About the author

Craig Holden is the author of the novels The River Sorrow, The Last Sanctuary, Four Corners of Night, The Jazz Bird, The Narcissist's Daughter, and the forthcoming Matala. He is a recipient of the Great Lakes Book Award in Fiction, and was a featured guest at the Festival International du Roman Noir in Frontignan, France. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. He has taught at the Universities of Michigan and Toledo, and is currently the visiting writer at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, where he, his wife, four kids and two dogs, have settled at the edge of the high desert.

Reviews

[Michael]

It's like a B movie transcribed to text. Easy to read but it's pretty much just rubbish. The main carachter is a desert storm vet who takes off to bring his crack head brother back home from Cali. Along the way he meets up with a wacked out couple who trick him into pulling a robbery with them for the cash he needs to get to Cali. Ends up they wack an arms dealer in the process which gets some native american ATF agent's panties in a twist. Oh yeah there is also this old wronkled gun running pot smoking cult leader who has these people convinced he is god.

It's not Ibsen but it's good on the can in the morning. You can easily put it back down and pick it up again so I would keep it handy for just that purpose. Toilet reading. The other cool thing is that it's so forgetable that 2 years later you can read it all over again and it will just seem like hmm...where have I heard this before?....oh well.

[Randy Schultz]

Having read an awful lot of 'noir' and B authors chug their way through novels that begin like this one did, it is with some dismay that I have to inform you that this novel is an attempt by a B author to break free from that mold. To write something bigger and better, more meaningful and larger in scope.

Sigh. In a better authors hands, this story may have held together but as it stands, Holden isn't able to either seal together the disparate components of his story nor make them work together. In the end we have a nice little Cobenesque story that goes skittering off the rails into the realm of larger issues. Really, to have made this story credible, Holden would have needed to make the book 3 times as long. Now all that said, it doesn't mean that I won't pick up another Holden book. I like that he took he risk in going bigger. It shows moxie. That he failed is almost immaterial, the guy can write. He's no King, or Grisham, and can't hold a candle to Crais or Hunter but...there's potential here. But for Last Sanctuary, I found myself actually struggling to finish it, so disinterested did I become in the story, by the time it ended I just didn't give a shit anymore.

[Rob Haswell]

By my old standards, this book would have been a 5, but I'm trying to "rebrand" by 5s, with a little higher bar. I think a 5 should rise to "unequivocal and unqualified" recommend to anyone, whether they read "that type" of book or not. The Last Sanctuary doesn't quite rise to that level, but boy what a well-plotted and interesting thriller. It combines multiple structures (buddy adventure, reluctant hero, falsely accused hero, unconventional love stories, really unlikeable villian, as well as Cult activity) to make for an extremely readable tale. What's particularly compelling, and what makes it different than many, is the fact that all the main players have great skill sets, every bit as good (or better) than the hero. Holden has also created some extremely strong female characters, both of whom drive narrative at different times in the novel. All in all, a huge winner of a book.

[Kris]

Difficult to get into. Very slow at the beginning, actually for 2/3 of the book. Persistence made me finish.

[Louis Giancola]

If this wasn’t a book club, I wouldn’t have finished this book. It was full of tropes and miraculous escapes.

[Cynthia Conley]

I had to give this book 3 stars because of the writing. The story was great and I would have given it 5 starts if it weren't for the poor writing. It plucks my nerves when a novel has sentences with only 3 or 4 words in it and constantly reading, "said Joe", etc. I almost stop reading it shortly after I started but the story had me intrigued.

[Kathi]

There were so many negative reviews of this book, but I don't understand why. It kept me coming back, wanting to know what was going to happen next. I didn't really get into any of the character's heads except for Joe, but that was okay. The fact that two average guys (Joe and Cal) were able to accomplish what they did was a little unbelievable, and maybe that's the reason for the low ratings?

[Brent]

Wasn't a bad read. There are many story lines to keep track of while experiencing the tale and that became a bit burdensome before they all started to come together. This may be one of those books where the idea behind it was a bit better than how the book actually turned out.

[Arch]

According to this book description, it's an interracial book.

[Lee]

With a frame job - good sense of place of the pacific northwest and some desolate wilderness area's of Alaska - this was a pretty good, suspenseful thriller.

[Jackie Simons]

Read 12/98

[Kate]

Read too long ago to rate.