In Johnson's slow-to-start but ultimately satisfying literary thriller set in the early 1970s, 15-year-old David Geist is a sensitive high school student and cross-country runner whose mental landscape is colored by a simultaneous resentment and love for his recovering alcoholic father, Max, recently returned to the family after years of estrangement. David ventures with Max and his younger sister, Janie, on a trip to the northern Minnesota Boundary Waters area on what he hopes will be a healing vacation with his father. But a gang of redneck thugs from the local meatpacking plant has taken to the lakes at the same time in order to assassinate their supervisor, who is threatening to interfere with their black market beef-stealing operation. After the murder-and still in a killing rage-Penry, the gang's leader, hunts down and attacks Max, who had verbally insulted him earlier, and rapes Janie. David arrives in time to kill one of Penry's accomplices with the hunting knife Max has given him as a present, but Penry escapes. In the end, with the help of a mysterious local outlaw, David confronts Penry in a dramatic and tragic showdown. Johnson (Don't Think Twice) lays the coming-of-age nostalgia on thick and sweet at first and may lose some readers early on as a result. But after several chapters of overly wistful, throat-clearing prose, he delivers a riveting, character-driven tale of action and loss set in a beautiful and remote corner of wild America that's sure to please a wide range of readers. 8-city author tour. (Mar. 9) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Set in Minnesota in the 1970s, this latest from Johnson (Six Crooked Highways) is at once a coming-of-age tale and a survival story. Fifteen-year-old David Geist is the product of a troubled family. His father, Max, physically abused him before abandoning the family. A budding track star, David is now being bullied by a lunkish football player at school. When his estranged father returns, he proposes that David and his younger sister, Janie, take a trip to the north woods with him as a way of healing old wounds. Once there, the family runs afoul of a group of small-time criminals. After David wards off a brutal attack on their campsite, he has to find a way to get his injured father and sister to safety while being pursued by the remaining thugs. Though Johnson's overuse of foreshadowing is puzzling and structurally questionable, it does little to diminish the impact of the savagely elemental chase that is the novel's heart. Recommended for most public libraries.-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

It's Minnesota lake country, not Georgia, this time, but we're back in the canoes, and unspeakable evil is on our tail. Yes, it's Deliverance all over again, but with some remarkable differences. The pull of Dickey's novel was entirely mythic, butohnson manages the dazzling feat of surrounding his mythic confrontation with a human drama, the coming-of-age of a troubled teenager, that is as subtly realistic as the battle with evil is archetypally grand. David Geist is a 15-year-old cross-country star living with the secret of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his physician father; now that father, Max, is back, having impressed his ex-wife with his personal transformation and confident that a canoe trip with David and his younger sister will bring around his unconvinced children. So it's off to upper Minnesota, where the idyllic lake country harbors a group of meat packers on the run from possible criminal prosecution. What is remarkable about all of this isn't plot, but the wayohnson manipulates his formulaic ingredients. The meat packers emerge not as satanic role players but as fully formed characters, evil, yes, but in frighteningly understandable ways (reminiscent of Stephen Hunter's Dirty White Boys); the father-son conflict rises above cliche at every seemingly predictable turn; and the descriptive writing is as crisp as a Minnesota morning, utterly unsentimental in its ability to reveal both the beauty and the alien power of the natural world. This novel works on every level, echoing its similarly themed predecessors but never in the slightest derivative. --Bill Ott Copyright 2004 Booklist

Sluggish thriller by Johnson (Six Crooked Highways, 2000, etc.) about a camping trip that goes wrong when an unhappy family runs into a gang of small-time thugs. Max and Rachel Geist, separated for some time, are trying to make a fresh start in their marriage. As a part of this domestic reconciliation, Max decides to take their teenaged son David and his seven-year-old sister Janie on a camping trip in the northern Minnesota wilderness. Meanwhile, a very different outing is being planned by four woebegone meat packers. At the urging of his sister Carol, Jack Carpenter, a manager at the Dysart plant in Austin, Minnesota, agrees to take her husband Stacey and his pals Munson and Penry on a hunting trip through the same forest. It's not exactly a vacation: Stacey has been charged with assault and battery for beating up a Mexican immigrant who works at the plant, and Carol is afraid that the man may die in the hospital, leaving her husband to face charges of manslaughter or worse. So they all head up near the border, ready to slip Stacey across to Canada in case he needs to flee the country. Although he agreed to the plan, Jack is suspicious of his brother-in-law, especially since he's discovered that Stacey and his pals are involved in a scam that has lifted thousands of dollars of merchandise from the plant over the last year. For their part, Stacey and Penry detest Jack as a stooge of the bosses and resent his promoting a Mexican worker over them. They also suspect he's on to their scheme. There's bad blood all around, and things get worse when a chance encounter with Max Geist and his kids turns into a minor scuffle that leads to major disaster. Remember Deliverance? City folks should stay out of the woods. A very pale knockoff of James Dickey, with ponderous narration taking us through the obvious and predictable story at a snail's pace. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Adult/High School-This tense and realistic psychological thriller gets off to a deliberate start as readers become acquainted with 15-year-old David's familial, social, and psychological dynamics. Bright and athletic, the teen lives a grimly solitary life at school, where he isn't afraid to stand up to a senior bully. At home, he is miffed by his mother's apparent weakness for her former husband and protective of his younger sister, Janie, who was adopted only a few years earlier. The pace picks up quickly when their father takes the children on a camping trip in northern Minnesota. Cocky and socially ill at ease, he isn't as clear as David about the natural hazards for which they must plan-but, much more dangerously, he unwittingly involves them with a psychopath and his own entourage of drunken companions. Disaster is visited on the family with such harshness that readers may wince, but the narrative arc will keep them turning the pages, along with a ray of hope that David can save them all in the end. Set in the late 1960s, the story has a few cases of anachronistic slang, but, overall, character and plot development are polished and exquisite, even when the characters are vile. David's relationship with Janie is sweet but not saccharine. Her rape and his requisite act of retaliation are realistic. This is a strong story, in every sense, with a compelling and believable resolution that unfolds as fully and deliberately as the setup.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.