Friday, June 27, 2014

Scalped Volume 5: High Lonesome



So I recently read that the best part of a good Noir story is the inevitability of the characters. You know that gumshoe is going to get into trouble way over his head. You know that the beautiful woman is only going to cause trouble. And you know that convict that just came home from prison is on the fast track back. In a good Noir story there really aren't many surprises, you know everyone is going to take a fall it’s just a matter of when and where.

 In Volume 5 of Scalped, the halfway point of the series, we get a look into the past of the various characters of the series and it has the feeling of a roller coaster slowly clicking up, up, up until you’re at the peak looking at the fall before you. And just like a roller-coaster at the peak of its highest drop you finish this volume with your stomach dropping into your nether regions and your heart in your throat.


Volume 5 is a split between stories of a Con Man coming to the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation’s casino to run card counting scams and flashbacks to a few of the characters pasts. He’s more than happy with hustling blackjack tables until he sees a drug addled FBI Agent Dashiel Bad Horse and threatens to expose him as an undercover agent unless he helps him rob the casino. We then go to a flashback of the life of the other undercover agent on the Rez, Diesel. We get to look into his early life and how he coped with dealing with people who refused to accept his mixed ancestry. Next is a look into Agent Nitz’s past and we get to see how the murder of his two fellow agents on the Rez over 30 years ago has consumed his life and left him filled with nothing but rage and a desire for revenge. Finally we get a flashback to that faithful day in 1975, the day that the two FBI agents were murdered on the Rez. We finally get the answer to the series question of, “Who murdered those two agents and why?” The answer was a twist I wasn't expecting.


This volume was a good setup for the rest of the series and made me excited to dive into the rest of the volumes.  High Lonesome was a great read and the payoffs for the first half of the series made me excited to see the inevitable falls for the characters that the future volumes will hold.

Post by Sam
Twitter: BigSam425


No comments:

Post a Comment