Buck Gentry

Do you live in Western North Carolina near Waynesville, Asheville or "the Kingdom of Madison" (County)? Then Rick Gentry's mammoth (604 pages) 2005 novel BUCK GENTRY is all about your home stomping grounds. *****Buck is an animal ranger for the State of North Carolina. He plays around with women and has a temper. But on balance gigantic Buck Gentry is a straight shooter. He stirs up a hornet's nest, however, when he breaks up an illegal dog fight and upsets mobsters in Atlanta who had supplied both a dog and placed bets on the event. All the bets money mysteriously disappears and most of the rest of the novel goes to the city mob's trying to find out who took it and how they can establish new criminal links to the "backward" mountaineers of Western North Carolina. ***** Buck lives with his saintly widowed mother who has "the Sight" and who wants grandchildren and therefore a wife for Buck, but who worries that Buck's new love will take him away from her. There are two prima facie unrelated sets of murders that come together in the novel's exciting final manhunt in very wild mountains. A property developer is out to get Buck's mother's farm away from her, with lots of complicated backings and forthings on the edge of legality. A mob's enforcer, gigantic, black, former Atlanta Falcons star tangles with Buck but is defeated by Buck and Buck's pit bull, recently rescued from the dog fight. The two men become close friends and Buck's mother acquires a new son -- not for the first time. ***** This latest novel by Waynesville's Rick Boyer is twice as long as and even more complicated than any of his nine DOC ADAMS detective thrillers. Only Boyer's early Sherlock Holmes pastiche, THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA comes close in length and twists and turns. A very good read. -OOO-