World, Chase Me Down
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
Winner of the 2018 Nebraska Book Award for Fiction A rousing, suspenseful debut novel—True Grit meets Catch Me If You Can—based on the forgotten true story of a Robin Hood of the American frontier who pulls off the first successful kidnapping for ransom in U.S. history “A kidnapper with a social-justice mission” (Time), Pat Crowe was once the most wanted man in America. World, Chase Me Down resurrects him, telling the electrifying story of the first great crime of the last century: how in 1900 the out-of-work former butcher kidnapped the teenage son of Omaha’s wealthiest meatpacking tycoon for a ransom of $25,000 in gold, and then burgled, safe-cracked, and bond-jumped his way across the country and beyond, inciting a manhunt that was dubbed “the thrill of the nation” and a showdown in the court of public opinion between the haves and have-nots—all the while plotting a return to the woman he never stopped loving. As if channeling Mark Twain and Charles Portis, Andrew Hilleman has given us a character who is bawdy and soulful, grizzled, salty, and hard-drinking, and with a voice as unforgettable as that of Lucy Marsden in Alan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All—an antihero you can’t help rooting for.
Reviews with the most likes.
The publishing/marketing person who wrote “Catch Me If You Can meets True Grit” has got it right.
It is an action-packed western (sort of set later than a traditional western) combined with an engaging character portrait.
Pat Crowe, the protagonist/ anti hero was a real person who kidnapped and held a minor for ransome. I wasn't familiar with his story so I can't say how much of this was true. It doesn't matter much to me; it's such a good story no matter what really happened and what was made up.
Crowe gives his own first-person narration in a language that seems too poetic for who he is but it's so well done that I overlooked that. It's sort of like watching Deadwood. Makes no sense that people are talking the way they are but it sounds cool, so viewers roll with it.
I'm not sure why Hilleman tells the story out of order. Maybe it adds some suspense that telling it from A-Z would not. It's nothing that bothers me; great novels are often done this way.
One of my favorite reads of 2022.
