The Long Night of Winchell Dear

From Booklist\nAfter parlaying his mega-hit, The Bridges of Madison County (1992), into a sequence of gruffly romantic westerns, including High Plains Tango (2005), Waller leaves love in the dust in this concentrated tale of desert noir. It's the dead of night, but no one is sleeping. Pablo crosses the border, burdened with a heavy pack and a heavy heart, heading for a ranch outside Clear Signal, Texas. There he'll hand the goods over to Sonia, whose employer, Winchell Dear, is an on-in-years professional poker player who won the ranch in a game. Unaware of his housekeeper's narco activities, he nonetheless senses menace in the air, and, practiced at maintaining a "genteel savagery," he stays awake and vigilant, playing a complex game of solitaire with his Colt automatic at hand. Another old-timer, a seven-foot diamondback, is on the prowl, while Peter Long Grass, a Comanche living on the land with Winchell's tacit permission, also keeps watch. Except for the rattler, who thinks only of food, each character is assailed by memories, allowing Waller to tell the preposterous yet entertaining tale of Winchell's Depression-era boyhood apprenticeship to a card shark. Meanwhile, two overdressed, well-armed, and none too bright thugs from Los Angeles churn their way across the desert in a Lincoln Continental, providing both imminent danger and comic relief. Waller has dealt himself a hand of stereotypes, but he plays a sure and mesmerizing game, and reader takes all. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved\nThe steady tick of an aged Regulator wall clock and the squeak of an overhead fan turning slowly are soft but insistent, counting down the night, while the high desert thrums like a half-remembered Victrola song. The sounds are below the consciousness of Winchell Dear, an old-time gambler, a Texas poker player on the southern circuit, as he waits for something . . . something vague that his life of chance tells him is evil and moving his way.\nIn Diablo Canyon, a distant part of Winchell Dear’s ranch, Peter Long Grass squats by a campfire, contemplating the profile he saw moving along the ridge of Guapa Mountain an hour ago, thinking about the gambler’s housekeeper, Sonia Dominguez, about the small, quiet world he has fashioned far from civilization and what undefined presence might now be threatening it. He gathers his tools and begins to run across the desert floor.\nAnd boring toward all of them is a cream-colored Lincoln Continental with two men aboard. Traveling from Los Angeles on a mission they’ve been given, they are professionals, cool and implacable at the start, but becoming steadily more confused by the strange landscape they are passing through. Forty minutes from their task, they ready themselves, while a kitchen wall clock ticks its way through the long night of Winchell Dear.\nThe Long Night of Winchell Dear finds master storyteller Robert James Waller at his best as he takes us into the shadowy world of high-stakes poker fought in the back rooms of Amarillo and Little Rock, and headlong toward the story’s stunning finale of chaotic terror, where an unexpected hero emerges.