Sometimes the Wolf: A Novel

Sometimes the Wolf by Urban Waite is a mystery crime novel that hides a serious family drama. Tense and powerfully plotted father and son issues drive this novel of murder, kidnapping and stolen drug money in the Pacific Northwest winter. Waite's prose and pace is filled with well developed characters and the spellbinding morality of Dennis Lehane police dramas or the down home spin of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Waite also uses his setting, to expertly set a tone of isolation and despair.

"..Looking at his father now, with his hair grown out and a beard matted across his face, his skin pulled flat in places and creased in others, Drake felt like he didn't know his father the way he should. So much time had passed with nothing being said show more between them. Patrick wearing the same clothes he'd gone in with twelve years before, outdated and now large on his thin, muscular frame.
Behind, the guard closed the door and Drake heard the latch fall as Patrick crossed the lot to where he waited by the car. The old canvas coat open at Patrick's chest, revealing the flannel shirt and jeans he'd gone in with all those years before.
"I see you've gone wild," Drake said, gesturing to his father's white mane.
Patrick smiled. He'd been in there a long time. And the creases on his skin looked all the deeper. "I've always been wild," he said...

Deputy Bobby Drake picked his father up outside of the prison after twelve years. Patrick Drake had been Sheriff before a DEA sting operation had caught him running drugs across the Canadian border. Now after being locked up for twelve years, Patrick was hoping to make amends with his son and what remained of the family he had left behind. But sometimes the past doesn't stay in the past and with hundreds of thousands of dollars of drug money missing, Patrick's past wasn't going to leave him alone.

DEA agent Driscoll is sure that Patrick knows where the missing money is as well as how two known gangsters ended up killed twelve years ago and he isn't about to back down now. He's been waiting for Patrick to get released and he isn't above using Bobby to get his father.

But Driscoll isn't the only problem as two more men, recently released from prison, come knocking. They want the money too and they will go much farther than Driscoll to find it.

Bobby must now find out the truth of what happened all those years ago and fast. They have his wife. The DEA is threatening to take his job and his home. And his recently released father Patrick, who he is responsible for, has just gone missing.

Sometimes The Wolf is a tense crime drama along the lines of Fargo. The bad guys are just a little badder then they have to be and the good guys really aren't all that good. With everyone after their own agendas, how they get there means as little to them as the people they hurt along the way.

At the center of the story is Bobby Drake and his relationship with his estranged father Patrick. Bobby had to give up so much of his own life when his father went to jail. A disgraced sheriff and dying other, left Bobby with a burden no young man should have to carry in a small town where everyone knew your business. Now with his father back, he is torn between reconciliation and recrimination. But when his wife is kidnapped and the reality that his father had been hiding drug money all this time, Bobby is left with the only option available. To save his family and life, even if it means turning his father in.

Waite creates colorful characters with a backdrop as formidable as the frozen northwest.

Sometimes is a strong read with lasting depth. show less

Former sheriff Patrick Drake is finally getting out of jail, twelve years after he got caught in a drug-dealing scheme. His son Bobby was twenty when he went away and is now a deputy in Patrick's old small-town department. Patrick's father Morgan is living off the land in a rural cabin far outside town and knows more than anyone realizes about his son's past misdeeds. The sequel (companion, perhaps?) to the author's debut [b:The Terror of Living|8666759|The Terror of Living|Urban Waite|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344264728s/8666759.jpg|13538381] (which I have not read), SOMETIMES THE WOLF opens the day Bobby Drake picks his father up from prison. Bobby doesn't know Patrick's past is following them and about to catch up in a dangerous show more way.

As crime thrillers go, the setup isn't stunningly new. Bad men believe Patrick still has some of the drug money hidden away, and naturally they want said money, and naturally they'll do anything to get it. What makes this novel interesting is the interplay between three generations of Drake men, how they talk to each other and what they think of each other, who respects whom and who doesn't (the latter should be somewhat obvious). The reason I come back to this genre time and time again is because while the setups are always familiar, the conclusions often are not. An author can start off with a premise like this one and do almost anything with it. What Urban Waite chooses to do with it is the main source of my disappointment.

A secondary source is the writing itself. The sentence fragments in this book might outnumber the complete sentences, and they're often clumsily rendered as dependent phrases (an entire book of "The quick brown fox jumping over the lazy dog"). The point of view isn't very deep, but there are too many paragraphs of character introspection to call it omniscient. For example, when the scene takes place from Bobby's point of view, the reader is frequently told "Drake was angry at his father," "Drake didn't know what to say," "Drake didn't know how he felt about that." Speaking of Bobby Drake, he's referred to in narrative as "Drake" throughout the book (even in his father and grandfather's scenes), another thing that keeps the point of view on the surface.

In addition to the stylistic problems, the characters are more than a little frustrating. The status in this book belongs too much to the villains. Bobby seems to be the protagonist, judging from allotted page time, but he's a passive entity in most of the plot pieces. He's called "smart" more than once, but he spends the entire book being fed information (and he has to be the only sheriff's deputy in history to knock on a door and then turn his back so the bad guys can jump him). His most decisive actions come after the climax and are actually decisions not to act. Perhaps Mr. Waite made Bobby a helpless character on purpose, but this combined with the choice to leave most of the character relationships unresolved makes for a dissatisfying read.

It's a well-paced story with a good balance of description, dialogue, and action. Morgan, Patrick, and Bobby are an interesting trio of action and consequence, of decision and fallout, of loyalty and distrust. There's a quality of understated reality to the book overall that feels authentic, not forced. If I hadn't tripped over so many pointless sentence fragments, and if the main characters had exhibited a bit more competence and determination in their lives overall, this might have been a four-star read for me. show less