Customer Reviews

Yellow Medicine

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It's no secret that I am a big fan of Anthony Neil Smith's YELLOW MEDICINE, and a fan of his other novels and stories, too. And then there's the PLOTS WITH GUNS online noir fiction zine he edits...

Face it, the dude simply does not disappoint.

With this, his third novel, Smith delivers what I've come to expect from him, and then amps it up some more and drives it home with this slambang full-throttle tale of crime, corruption, wannabe terrorists, and psychobilly madness.

Deputy Billy Lafitte, in many ways, is like a character outta a Harry Crews novel, except Neil takes Lafitte outta the South, drops him into the frozen wastelands of rural Minnesota, and then lets this guy speak for himself. It quite a ride. One every lover of crime and noir should want to take.

Many protagonists have straddled the fence between good and bad guy but none so much or so well in recent years as Anthony Neil Smith's Deputy Billy Lafitte. Not exactly amoral, Billy cares about what he wants and does what he has to do to get it. But, in the end, even he has a moral line that he will not cross.

One of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Billy sowed the seeds of his own destruction in a few dicey games of bad cop, worse cop. Displaced from the warmth of the Bayou to the cold Minnesota tundra, he is separated from all he once cared about (ex-wife and kids). All that draws him to action is affection for a
Psychobilly singer named Drew. When he tries to "help" Drew's boyfriend, Ian, a slow and powerful chain of events is set off. This isn't just meth mixing madmen. This isn't just a psychotic man with a fast draw. This is bad guys gone international. And Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota is just as good a place to start a jihad as any.

When it comes to fiction, Smith does it cleaner, darker and harder than anybody. He creates a story that runs to extremes and is utterly real. A character that seems despicable is not lovable nor empathetic yet utterly engrossing. And a book that has you racing to the end, regretting having read it so damn fast when you're done. Can't wait for the next one!

Billy Lafitte is a bad man. Flawed, self-destructive, corrupt, larcenous, mean. Yes, Billy Lafitte is a very bad man. However, in flawless genre form, Lafitte is also loyal and he gets the job done and he's the perfect noir hero. What is a noir hero? Here: "The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time." - Frank Miller

First things first. If you're going to get into the ring with Anthony Neil Smith, know going in that he's going to hit you and he's going to hit you hard and short of putting the book down, there's not a damn thing you can do about it. So if you're looking for noir that knocks you around for a couple of hundred pages then stop reading my comments and buy the book.

Yellow Medicine has a complex, intricate and nuanced plot and I don't feel I can review it without giving too much of that plot away and I think doing that would spoil the fun. So, in short, Billy Lafitte is a deputy in Yellow Medicine, Minnesota. Unhappy living in the north, he's pretty much up against the wall. He needed a break after losing his wife, family and job in Gulfport, Mississippi after Hurrican Katrina, and when his ex brother-in-law offered him the deputy job in Minnesota, he relocated and took it with the hope of making a new start. Of course, this is noir and things don't turn out as planned. I apologize for the understatement; things really don't turn out as planned. I apologize again; this isn't noir, this is classic noir, and you're going to have go a ways to find anything as good as this being written today. And that's the truth.

The truth according to Deputy Lafitte? "The truth is only as real as what you see in front of you, and here it is: truth waivers. The only constant is change. Even in faith - people want what they want and believe they can have it in spite of what their faith tells them. So they either justify what they want or change their faith to fit in."

This is good stuff.

I'm not quite sure which book "Julio Sheen" read, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't YELLOW MEDICINE. Sure, it follows some sort of formula as all good books do. And it resides firmly within its crime/noir subgenre. It's populated by characters of questionable morals doing criminal things based on a code of justice that doesn't always jive with the laws of the land. The characters are believable, though not always likable, which is great.

As for the accusation of jingoism, I'm not sure where he thought the book exhorted "extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy." The Deputy plainly waffles in his view of the terrorists -- wanting them merely out of his life, wanting them dead, wanting them to be something other than they are, hating them for their actions, hating them for the effect they've had on his life, hating them for making him make the choices he's made. The agent is obviously frustrated in his own way, looking for answers just to have some. The comment about fear snowballing if you really think about it is a very rational one that most people have probably had at some point -- and not such about international terrorists.

Overall, I found it to be an engrossing and highly-entertaining read and would recommend it to anyone who's a fan of crime/noir and not squeamish.

THIS AUTHOR JUST KEEPS PUMPING OUT NASTY, SUSPENSEFUL + ENGROSSING BOOKS. I THINK THIS IS HIS BEST SO FAR.

This is true crap. There are SO many authors out there doing better work. Avoid this books at all costs; don't be suckered in by the back-cover blurbs as I was. Pure, badly written jingoistic crap. So, So disappointing.