Down Range - Taylor Moore

I don’t read many modern thrillers, but I’d seen enough good comments about Taylor Moore’s debut novel DOWN RANGE that I decided I’d give it a try. Plus, it’s set in Texas which is always a nice bonus as far as I’m concerned.

The protagonist is Garrett Kohl, a DEA agent who’s working for the CIA in Afghanistan. That’s where this novel begins, but the setting switches quickly, and logically, to the Texas Panhandle, where it remains for the rest of the book. Garrett, who grew up on a ranch near the town of Canadian, is tasked with protecting the life of a little Afghan boy who witnessed a massacre. He figures going home will be the best way to do that.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t figured on landing up to his neck in an even worse mess that will threaten the life not only of the boy he’s charged with protecting but also everybody else in Garrett’s family.

It takes a while to get everything in the plot set up, and consequently the first half of DOWN RANGE is a little slow despite a few bursts of action. But then the second half is almost all action, and Moore does a great job with it. I know from experience as both a writer and a reader that it’s hard to do lengthy firefights without them getting boring, but Moore pulls that off and kept me flipping the pages with enthusiasm and eagerness to find out what was going to happen. However, as much as I enjoy action in my reading, that’s not the main appeal of this book for me.

I said up in the first paragraph that I don’t read many modern thrillers, and here’s the reason for that: they all sound alike. Too many of them read as if they could have been written by any of a hundred different contemporary thriller authors. My theory—and this is only a theory—is that many of these authors haven’t read extensively among older thriller authors and mostly read the work of their peers. They’ve had so many rules hammered into their heads that they don’t know any other way to write. And so everything they produce reads the same.

To be honest, there’s some of that in DOWN RANGE, too. There are scenes that could have come out of any of a thousand other books. But then . . . ah, but then . . . there’s a bit of description, or a line of dialogue, or an interaction between characters, or even a throwaway moment of transition, and a grin appears on my face as I think that nobody else in the world would have written this particular thing this particular way. Only Taylor Moore. And that’s what makes DOWN RANGE an excellent novel. He knows the place and he knows the people and he writes about all of it in his own voice.

Now, there are a couple of quibbles I can make. I don’t think it takes two and a half hours to drive from the Joint Reserve Base in west Fort Worth to Possum Kingdom Lake (but I’m thrilled that a contemporary thriller even mentions Possum Kingdom Lake). I think I could make it in an hour and a half, two tops. But you know what, I could be wrong about that, especially since Moore doesn’t specify exactly where on Possum Kingdom Lake Garrett is going. The other thing (and I’ll die on this hill) is that y’all is spelled y’all, not ya’ll.

You see why I called them quibbles.

Anyway, all in all, DOWN RANGE is an absolutely superb book, and if you enjoy thrillers, I give it a very high recommendation. It's available in e-book, hardback, paperback, and audio editions. I don’t know if I’ll become a fan and read everything Taylor Moore writes, but I’ll definitely read the next book in this series.