Book Review: Panther Gap by James A. McLaughlin

Bowman and Summer Girard were raised almost single-handedly by their dad in a small, private valley known as Panther Gap. Leo Girard is a former military man whose time in foreign service left him with perhaps questionable views on humanity. He wants his kids to appreciate nature and science, and perhaps most importantly to be wary of other people. For he knows that sometime in the future they’ll inherit a considerable fortune, one that powerful interests will do anything to seize for themselves.

While Summer turns out relatively well-adjusted and goes on to run the family ranch, Bowman has a much harder road to travel. Sensitive and likely on the autism spectrum, he takes his father’s teachings too much to heart, learning an empathy with animals that borders on the hallucinatory. While still a teenager, he decides to retrace the steps of the creature he is certain gave their home its name. He doesn’t believe that the panther in question had been a local mountain lion: he’s sure it was a jaguar traveling far beyond the northern end of its usual range.

Attempts by both Leo and Summer to bring him home face differing degrees of failure. As the years go by, Summer tries to feel less hurt by what she sees as his abandonment of their family, even as the income required to keep their homestead going continues to dwindle. Learning of the time-locked inheritance is a godsend for her. But Bowman has a different perspective, and is finally ready to come home after a series of signs and disasters points him back, if only to save his sister from unwittingly walking into danger.

His re-immersion in the technology he left behind in favor of living off the grid on a Costa Rican beach is jarring, as he tries to remind himself that this isn’t an alien world he’s coming back to, just a different part of it:

The sudden reinsertion into American clamor and commerce had triggered a sense of dislocation, as if he’d teleported to a different dimension where he didn’t even know himself. This perception, he knew, was false. The urban setting, air travel, the enclosure of the airport’s four walls, the technological soup, it was all of a piece with hanging suspended ten feet underwater, holding his breath, watching the yellow-on-black sea snakes swim in the cove. It was all real, all part of the same terrible, magnificent world. It wasn’t something you could leave or return to. You were always in it.

Even as Summer waits for Bowman to come home, she’s busy dealing with the sudden appearance of a man on her property, who comes spouting a wild tale. Sam Hay is a tax lawyer who’d embarked on a road trip out west with his best friend Mac. Against his advice, Mac had picked up a beautiful drifter. Trouble swiftly followed in her wake, leaving Sam abandoned and desperate in the Colorado desert. He accidentally stumbles across Panther Gap, and begs Summer for help in saving his friend. Summer is canny enough to realize that having a tax lawyer in her back pocket, especially in the face of incoming wealth, is never a bad thing. Little does she realize, though, that agreeing to help him will put her in the crosshairs of even more dangerous people than she’d ever expected.

This sprawling tale of modern malfeasance takes the template of the Western genre and infuses it with both technological sophistication and a deeper appreciation for ecology. These two aspects often rub up against each other, but more often serve as illuminating juxtaposition in James A. McLaughlin’s beautiful prose. 

Embodying these aspects are our two main protagonists. Summer is an easy heroine to root for but Bowman can take a little getting used to. Good thing we spend so much time in his head then, as he’s called to act in ways he finds utterly contrary to his nature:

As a sophisticated–that is, self-aware–paranoiac, Bowman had had to learn how to make the right mistakes. Facing uncertainty and the unknowable minds of others, he would evaluate each pair of opposing interpretations of any situation agnostically, gaming out for each alternative the worst possible outcome if that interpretation was acted upon and turned out to be wrong. He would then choose to act upon the interpretation where being wrong resulted in the least harm. If he called Sarge and warned him, and his suspicion of the woman turned out to be wrong, Sarge would think he was crazy. If he went with the more reasonable interpretation that all was well, and it wasn’t, then Sarge could be hurt.

There is a lot going on in this 21st century Western, with Bowman and Summer traveling further than they’d ever imagined necessary in order to be able to face the future together. The narrative too travels back and forth in time as it explores how the siblings came to this pass, both chronologically and psychologically. Much of the present-day shenanigans feel messy, as crimes in real life often do, in contrast with the almost halcyon glow of a childhood that slowly dissipates as the children grow up and learn the truth of what they’ve inherited and their responsibility not only to each other but also to the greater world.