cover image Spirit Wolf

Spirit Wolf

Gary D. Svee. Walker & Company, $15.95 (161pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-0941-7

In the dead of winter at the turn of the century, young Nashua Brue and his father, Uriah, head out into the Montana wilderness, hunting a wolf that has been depredating cattle on area ranches. The local stockmen's association has put a $500 bounty on the wolf, a reward that brings dozens of men together for the hunt. Nashua meets an Irishman with the gift of gab, a wise old Indian who speaks of spirits and magic, some city slickers who try to win the bounty through illicit means and several other ""good'' Swedes like his father. And when it's all over, Nashua finds he has grown from boy to man and learned something about life as well. Not only is this a story told many times before, but the characters are stereotypes, the dialogue is wooden and the setting, which one would expect first novelist Svee, a Montana newspaperman, to evoke particularly well, is as flat as a Hollywood backlot. (March 24)