Bowman's Line

This risk-taking, idiosyncratic first novel combines a powerful voice with poor plotting. By chance, nomadic journalist Nate Bowman and a photographer stumble upon a mysterious nocturnal transaction in the Mexican desert. Discovered, they are pursued, and the photographer is killed. Nate, cut and bruised and thirsty, escapes across the border and heads home for Tucson, Ariz., where he's greeted by a heated squabble over land rights, his best girl--and two killers. Nate wanders taciturn across these pages, limping from one savage beating to the next. Every once in a while, he meets another free spirit to whom he explains what has happened so far. These moments, in which something like narrative emerges, are like oases for the perplexed reader. Laird's sparse prose uses a wonderful economy to evoke the unforgiving terrain of the borderlands between Mexico and the U.S., but his story--about what was going on in the desert and who was involved--is cut up into unnecessarily jagged pieces. His style is assured and likely to produce some first-rate crime fiction in the future, but this first effort is slapdash. (July)