cover image The Hookmen

The Hookmen

Timothy Hillmer. University Press of Colorado, $22.5 (244pp) ISBN 978-0-87081-348-1

The dangerous world of river rafting is examined in this uneven first novel, winner of the Colorado Fiction Award, that offers some fine outdoors writing but capsizes on cliches of both plot and character. Roy Cruz, who lives in a trailer with his alcoholic father and memories of a mother who left long ago, is a 19-year-old hookman on a crew that performs rescues and fishes dead bodies from the Kern River in the Sierra Nevada. While learning the ropes on the tricky rapids, Cruz is torn between Crawdad and Walker, two older crew members who are barely on speaking terms because of a past rivalry. Hillmer's gritty writing is effective during the river rescue scenes; but he is less successful depicting a romantic triangle between Cruz, Walker and Rita, a rape victim who's come to the wilderness to escape her past. While some of the early encounters between Cruz and Rita are convincingly tender, the characters degenerate into stereotypes, with Cruz's willingness to accept Rita's infidelity hard to swallow. The showdown on the rapids between Walker and Crawdad is also hackneyed. (Nov.)