Bad River (An Arliss Cutter Novel)
People who read series recognize four patterns: series that get stronger with each volume, series that get weaker, those that spike up and down, and those that hum along unchanged. Marc Cameron’s series about Deputy U.S. Marshall Arliss Cutter is one that gets stronger with each volume, now up to six.
Bad River can be read on its own but is better with series backstory as a foundation. Each volume builds on the one before. In this one, Arliss and his partner, Lola Teariki, traverse Alaska in boat, plane, and vehicle pursuing felons and killers. Cutter’s specialty is tracking so he is often called to a scene on short notice—in this instance, first pulled from a street arrest to find a pair of hikers gone missing on a mountain, then pulled from that to the far north where a body encased in ice includes evidence relevant to Cutter’s brother’s murder. Cutter has been trying to solve that mystery through all six books.
The tagline on the back cover captures the essence of this series: “He’s a force of nature. But so is the Alaskan wilderness.”
Each book pits Cutter against the unrelenting, unforgiving natural environment of interior Alaska. Even everyday life can be brutal there, where civilians as well as criminals (and law enforcers) might be eaten by bears, frozen into the ice, crashed into the terrain, drowned by tides and rivers, or simply killed by exposure after the simplest mishap.
One of Cutter’s colleagues says, “Dozens of women go missing every year in Alaska, mostly taken by bad men . . . but sometimes, it’s the land itself that gets them.”
It never gets Cutter, though, because he is so thoroughly trained, and so driven. Part of that drive comes from innate personality, but it was hardened into passionate mission by experience in Afghanistan that traumatized him into becoming a career white knight.
His sister-in-law notes: “I think someone could spit in your face, and you’d stay cool as a cucumber. . . . but Lord have mercy, some bully so much as looks cross-eyed at me or any other person under your very broad umbrella of protection and woe be unto his mortal soul. You are lightning quick to take offense on behalf of someone else.”
This makes Cutter a bulldog for bad guys, of which there’s plenty in his realm. “[His] grandfather, Grumpy, a Florida Marine Patrol officer who raised Cutter and his older brother, had always said there were only three kinds of people out between midnight and four a.m.—cops, paperboys, and assholes. Paperboys were a dying breed, but in Cutter’s experience, Alaska had just the right amount of assholes to provide plenty of job security for a professional man hunter.”
And Cutter is a man-hunter nonpareil. The narrative takes readers along every step of his tracking, and preparation for same, which gives an exciting education to armchair travelers and surely resonates with more adventurous types who have been there, done that.
Accuracy comes from the author’s own experience plus thorough research, so that all action, reaction, motivation, and location ring true. Any bloopers are invisible to the uninitiated, giving plausibility from start to finish despite the extremity of the situations.
Same holds true for portrayals of Native Alaskan culture, which becomes more and more of a factor the farther north and out into the bush Cutter goes.
Any weaknesses the book presents aren’t in the story or writing. The narrative gallops along, starting literally with a bang then building through cycling character viewpoints. What the book could really use is a map. Alaska is so vast, and so unfamiliar to the majority of readers, that it would be helpful to have an idea where things occur and how far apart they are. As well, there’s a side trip to South Dakota, which happens to be the site of the title river.
It’s unclear why this site became the story title, because while it’s indeed a player, it’s not where the primary dramas occur. Has a nice ring to it, though, in keeping with the series’ other titles.
An oddity at the end is book club discussion questions. Not the normal thing in crime/action novels; they tend to appear in literary and women’s fiction. But perhaps it’s appropriate, because this volume raises an existential question for series writers: When is the right time to stop?
Book six is a good place to end this series. Not because of doubt that the author can keep it going indefinitely, getting stronger and stronger, gathering more eager readers with compelling suspense, but because of the old saying, “Leave before the party’s over.” In Bad River, the plot and subplots of the individual story meld with the plots and subplots of the overall series, and either solidly resolve each element or imply a happy resolution in the near future. Stopping here would close the series at the top of its game.
That’s up to the author and publisher, of course, who can hear fans clamoring for more. But for literary analysts, it’s something to consider in terms of arc. The Arliss Cutter series has been terrific since book one and climbed steadily to a pinnacle. Well . . . it so happens that Alaska has the highest summit in North America, so there’s plenty of room for this series to keep rising.