Callan Wink's Beartooth is a meditative and startling literary heist tale about two struggling brothers. Their father has recently died, leaving them with medical bills they can't pay, and other expenses are piling up at the family cabin. Older brother Thad is desperate to keep things together; his younger brother, Hazen, doesn't have any of Thad's practical sense but more than his fair share of restlessness.
Enter the Scot: up to no good and refusing to take no for an answer, the Scot is looking to enlist the strapped brothers for a dangerous--not to mention illegal--job in the protected lands of Yellowstone. While Thad is reluctant, he's even more unwilling to let the house go, or to allow headstrong Hazen to take on the job alone.
Wink (August) is at home in rugged but beautiful settings, and he takes his time to look around at both the grandeur and the rot, the rippling muscles of this landscape and its bones. Rather than painting a static portrait, Wink makes this place the timeless one of the American West. While Beartooth's plot packs a punch, its natural rhythm builds gradually. Agreeing to the Scot's proposition sets a course into motion that Thad can't control. And Hazen's increasingly impulsive, wild ways will find an outlet that can't be bound, even by his brother's love. But despite Hazen's loaded personality, readers feel the same pull Thad does: to understand how deep Hazen runs, to embrace his perhaps more doomed but also more hopeful way of being in the world, a way of being that might be freer but is also more elusive. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor