The Dead Ringer

Bahr (Stag) delivers a bold, propulsive tale of violence and vengeance in the early-20th-century American West. The action opens with outlaw Ben Kilt emerging from a shallow grave in the Montana wilderness, only to narrowly survive a mountain lion attack. He’s saved by Bonnie Grace, a 13-year-old Native American girl, and brought to the remote cabin where she lives with her enslaver, whom Ben kills. He then takes Bonnie along to help find the man who buried him alive: his half brother and bank-robbing partner, Sidney Bosco. Bahr mostly sticks with Ben’s viewpoint as his quest for retribution ramps up, but occasional interludes from Bonnie’s perspective inject the otherwise sinewy narrative with philosophical flourishes (“One must embrace the changes and in turn change with them,” the teenager muses of her entanglement with Ben). As the body count increases, Ben’s thoughts take on a bleakly cerebral valence of their own: “Dying’s all the same, kiddo. There’s no beating that,” he tells Bonnie after killing three men who’ve accosted her. Eventually, the mash-up of bloody violence and high-minded prose threatens to grow wearisome, but Bahr’s outré vision and well-developed characters save the day. Thriller fans seeking something off the beaten path should check this out. (Apr.)