I'll own up straight away, I love reading anything that the great and wonderful Anthony Neil Smith writes; his cheeky tweets, blog posts, short stories or novels. So don't expect me to do anything other than glow about YELLOW MEDICINE. You're warned - I'm a total convert.
Smith doesn't EVER pull his punches; he writes noir so don't expect butterflies or rainbows. He writes noir that starts with a bad situation that then gets progressively worse before finally imploding into an unimaginable mess of blood, guns and heads.....yes heads, you read right.
Lafitte, a cop who's on his last chance after taking the law into his own hands one too many times after Hurricane Katrina struck the south, finds himself in Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota thanks to his ex brother-in-law Marshall, who throws him a last chance lifeline.
Minnesota isn't where Lafitte wanted to end up and he hates the freezing windswept vistas and the insular native population. But when he becomes involved in a college murder he begins to uncover the existence of a terrorist cell in a part of America not previously considered a vulnerable target.
That's all I'm going to tell you about the plot because you must read the story for yourself and find out how it unfolds.
What I find fascinating is the characters that Smith creates. Nothing is ever black and white or two dimensional. Lafitte is a complicated mixture of a cop who is, at his core, a caring human being; he tried to help those in need as he did after Katrina hit, helping people get much needed food, but whose actions and choices go astray as he regularly crosses the line into difficult to justify decisions and illegal deals.
Put it this way - as a cop, he has a healthy disregard for the law. His wife eventually had enough of his unreliable ways and his move to Minnesota came just in time to get him out of a too hot to handle gangster murder.
The harshness of life in the state of Minnesota also comes over strongly in Yellow Medicine. Having no previous knowledge of this state myself, Smith draws a very bleak picture of closed minds, restricted ambitions and grim, insular small communities sitting in the middle of vast tracks of arable land.
The perception of terrorism in America is obviously now a reality that people have had to accept over the last decade. However, in Yellow Medicine, Smith shakes small town America awake with the thought that terrorism can strike in the most unusual places, not just the metropolitan centres. This intrusion of evil from the outside world as it snakes into the parochial small lives of the citizens of Yellow Medicine County explodes into a noxious brew of fear and hatred directed at Lafitte.
Interestingly there is not a huge amount of cussing or sex in Yellow Medicine, unlike Choke on Your Lies and Psychosomatic, but don't let this put you off because there's more than enough physical violence, explosions and human dismemberment to make up!
