Dawson’s only son has been murdered by opportunistic, wannabe rustlers who believe, as a Mexican lawman drives home to Dawson, “There is no fault, senór-only targets and choices.” In Longpine, a tiny wart of a town, dilletante cattleman “Randy the Dandy” Dawson can barely sit a horse much less defend his property or family, readers discover, piecing together narrative fragments like shards of mirror glass from the story’s fractured, disturbing outset. The tale is a classic morality play of good and evil, strength and softness, vengeance and justice, law and vigilantism, set against a beautiful, sweeping backdrop of the American Southwest. That, in one breath, is the finely drawn dilemma James Wade turns over and over like a precious, light-refracting, darkness-harboring gemstone that is All Things Left Wild. Night, Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne warned, is but the shadow of light, and life just the shadow of death.
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