Book review: Thunder Road, by Colin Holmes
Thunder Road is a 384 page long Crime Noir.
Colin Holmes knows how to handle written language. It was a pleasure to read this novel.
In this gamble, more than a few poker chips are at stake.
When an Army Air Force Major vanishes from his Top Secret job at the Fort Worth airbase in the summer of 1947, down-on-his-luck former Ranger Jefferson Sharp is hired to find him, because the Major owes a sizable gambling debt to a local mobster. The search takes Sharp from the hideaway poker rooms of Fort Worth’s Thunder Road, to the barren ranch lands of New Mexico, to secret facilities under construction in the Nevada desert.
Lethal operatives and an opaque military bureaucracy stand in his way, but when he finds an otherworldly clue and learns President Truman is creating a new Central Intelligence Agency and splitting the Air Force from the Army, Sharp begins to connect dots. And those dots draw a straight line to a conspiracy aiming to cover up a secret that is out of this world⎯literally so.
We follow Jeff Sharp from where he comes home to find his wife in bed with another man and he starts a new life without her, to a dangerous game with high stakes when he gets involved in the disappearance of a major working with secret things in the Nevada desert.
The pace was too slow for my taste. The Major in question does not disappear until over a third of the book is read already. Interesting things happen in the meantime for sure, but nothing I felt was part of the story I thought I was reading: a crime noir.
I began to wonder why everyone smoked like chimneys, there were no cell phones, and there were wristwatches worth repairing. Then I read the description of the book again and saw that the story took place in 1947. If you miss this detail, the story becomes rather confusing. On the other hand, the author has caught the mode of the time well.
Since I am not an American — even less living in Texas — there were a few things that should have been better described to give me a correct picture of what was going on. An example of this is the main character Sharp’s two hats. One is in felt and he leaves this for getting cleaned and re-shaped. Another is a straw hat. My image of a felt hat is a fedora, not a cowboy hat, which I later learn that Sharp’s hat probably is. And a straw hat for me is something you use for the beach, which Sharp’s hat is not, obviously, but I cannot see for my inner eye what kind of hat it is.
I am not sure if I like Jeff Sharp. He is a fellow that helps you when you are in trouble and I would probably feel safe being around him. Still, he is married to a woman he has no trouble leaving without a second’s thought. And he does not realize that Roni is worth the trouble until she puts on a nice dress. Personally, I would dump a guy who does not find me interesting enough in everyday life.
But all this is my personal views and does not stop the novel from being interesting and worth reading. And as I said in the beginning, the language is fantastic and makes this book worthy of your time. I will sure read more books by Colin Holmes.
