cover image Son of Durango

Son of Durango

Laurance L. Priddy. Sunstone Press, $22.95 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-86534-242-2

A dark and brutal climax mars this otherwise hopeful tale, Priddy's second novel (after Winning Passion), which tells of a poor Mexican immigrant who leaves the family farm in Durango, Mexico, to find work in south Texas. Once across the border, Jesus Comacho lands a job as a ranch hand, only to lose it by making a pass at the white rancher's daughter. When the young man discovers that his brother, Miguel, may be in Ft. Worth, he finds work there, at a mobile home company. Romance blooms with Maggie Hinojosa, over the objections of her father, a plant foreman, but tragedy strikes when Jesus learns that Miguel is the victim of an industrial accident that has left him brain-damaged. To raise funds for his brother and his upcoming marriage, Jesus succumbs to the lure of quick cash by working as a drug runner. Priddy's writing is moralistic, but he builds narrative tension adeptly and represents the lives of hard-luck Mexican immigrants with precision and compassion. The lack of a proper transition between his protagonist's slow rise and his subsequent fall into betrayal and murder, however, produces an ending so jarring that it seems to have wandered in from another novel. (May)