Rick  Boyer
BUCK  GENTRY:
A NOVEL OF
THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS
Paperback: 604 pages
Alexander Books, Alexander, NC. 2005.

ISBN-1570902399


reviewed by Patrick Killough


(1) biblio.com:

Recommend to other readers?   YES! * * * * *

Do you live in Western North Carolina near Waynesville, Asheville or "the Kingdom of Madison" (County)? Then Rick Gentry's mammoth (604 pages) 2005 novel BUCK GENTRY is all about your home stomping grounds.

Buck is an animal ranger for the State of North Carolina. He plays around with women and has a temper. But on balance gigantic Buck Gentry is a straight shooter. He stirs up a hornet's nest, however, when he breaks up an illegal dog fight and upsets mobsters in Atlanta who had supplied both a dog and placed bets on the event. All the bets money mysteriously disappears and most of the rest of the novel goes to the city mob's trying to find out who took it and how they can establish new criminal links to the "backward" mountaineers of Western North Carolina.

Buck lives with his saintly widowed mother who has "the Sight" and who wants grandchildren and therefore a wife for Buck, but who worries that Buck's new love will take him away from her. There are two prima facie unrelated sets of murders that come together in the novel's exciting final manhunt in very wild mountains. A property developer is out to get Buck's mother's farm away from her, with lots of complicated backings and forthings on the edge of legality. A mob's enforcer, gigantic, black, former Atlanta Falcons star tangles with Buck but is defeated by Buck and Buck's pit bull, recently rescued from the dog fight. The two men become close friends and Buck's mother acquires a new son -- not for the first time.

This latest novel by Waynesville's Rick Boyer is twice as long as and even more complicated than any of his nine DOC ADAMS detective thrillers. Only Boyer's early Sherlock Holmes pastiche, THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA comes close in length and twists and turns. A very good read.  

-OOO-

http://www.biblio.com/search.php?stage=1&keyisbn
=rick+boyer+-+buck+gentry
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(2) lunch.com (8/6/10)

rating: * * * *

Headline: Being terrified and on the run in the Carolina Mountains

The lush green mountains, rapid rivers and remarkable people of Western North Carolina (WNC) have long drawn not just tourists and hikers but writers as well. Novelist Rick Boyer had first written of the rugged badlands of farthest west Graham County, Robbinsville and Lake Santeetlah in THE DAISY DUCKS. Most recently (2005) Boyer has written of the more densely populated areas 60 - 80 miles east: Waynesville, Asheville and the traditionally lawless "Kingdom of Madison" (County.) This he did in the 604 sprawling pages of BUCK GENTRY: A TALE OF THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS.

Giant 31-year old Buckingham Ian Gentry works for the State of North Carolina as an animal ranger. At novel's beginning he is going beyond his official responsibilities by breaking up a vicious dog fight not far from where he and his mother live, near Waynesville. He arrests no one. But he puts one horribly mauled dog out of its misery while taking another, Funnybones, to a vet. That pit bulldog, despite a broken leg, becomes Buck's faithful friend. He later saves Rick from defeat by an even larger man, a mob enforcer from Atlanta angry over the disappearance of the bets they had made on their dog (now Buck's). Buck and his attacker, a black, former Atlant football star, bury the hatchet after they both come out of hospital and Buck's aging mother suddenly has a second beloved son.    

An Asheville property developer needs to persuade Buck's widowed mother, who lives with unmarried Buck in the centuries old family home, to sell her farm near Waynesville. She holds out. And pressure is applied. The Atlanta mob seeks new outlets for its illegal drugs among the independent mountaineers and are not willing to take premium moonshine in exchange. Learn tracking techniques. e.g.,
"... it was the natural instinct of people on the run -- and most fleeing animals -- to seek high ground. Of the wild animals, only pigs and bears tend to head down into hollows and swamps. The others, especially cats, dogs, and people, seek high country" (Ch. 26, p. 531f).

I hope that, although brief,gives enough of the flavor of BUCK GENTRY for you to decide whether to take it up and read it for yourself. This novel is about assassins for hire, greed, kidnapping, pursuits, bloodhounds, romance, loyalty, alcoholism, pigs who feed on humans and the dark underbelly of the great mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, my county seat.



-OOO-


http://www.lunch.com/reviews/rick_boyer_buck_gentry-1521010.html
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http://www.lunch.com/reviews/rick_boyer_buck_gentry-1521010.html
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(3) bn.com  not available for review 8//10


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(4) amazon.com  08/07/2010

review title:  "Many times trouble just comes to folks"

rating of BUCK GENTRY:  * * * *

By 1998 Rick Boyer had written THE MAN WHO WHISPERED, his ninth and last DOC ADAMS detective thriller. He was laying more weight on and packing more plot, asides, esoteric learning and philosophy into this essentially simple genre than it could bear.

Boyer's latest novel (2005 - BUCK GENTRY: A NOVEL OF THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS) at 604 pages is more than twice the length of a typical Doc Adams thriller. BUCK GENTRY has more characters. The people are better defined and developed at a slower pace. This is Rick Boyer's first shot at "the great American novel." The new, more spacious format is a winner.

BUCK GENTRY is set in western North Carolina's mountains in and near Asheville, Waynesville and Madison County. Buck is tall, 31 years old, immensely strong, very attractive to the ladies, but he lives at home on the old farmstead with his widowed mother. He is well educated and enforces the animal and game protection laws of the Tarheel State.

Several of his boyhood friends make appearances, including a homeless drunk who wanders the streets of Asheville, witnesses one natural death and one murder and who proves to be an important thread in unraveling more than one mystery of this tale.

Another old friend is an environmental lawyer having an ill disguised affair with the wife of a real estate developer who is secretly engaged in persuading Buck's mother to sell the farm so that he can develop luxury estates near Waynesville. The developer blackmails the trysters to pressure Mrs Gentry to sell out. That lawyer is also hiding a terrible secret which comes close to getting Buck killed by a madman who abducts Buck's fiancee.

All these and other lines of plot come together in a high mountains man hunt which includes an Atlanta mob hitman out to assassinate Buck as his last assignment before retiring to a tropical pardise.

The story begins with Buck's breaking up an illegal dog fight. This would have been a rather humdrum affair except for the first time appearance in Western North Carolina of an Atlanta mob both supplying a champion pit bull named Funnybones and placing large bets. Buck sends all present at the fight packing, puts one dying dog out of its misery and takes the Atlanta pit bull to a vet to be patched up. The vet then gives the dog to Buck. But in the confusion at dog fight's confusion, someone walked off with all the bets. Initially, the Atlanta mob is made to believe that Buck Gentry is the thief. And nobody takes money from that gang!

Later an avenging mob enforcer sucker punches Buck on his front porch. But Funnybones saves his new master from a beating while savaging the attacker. That attacker is a sympathetically presented ex-pro footballer in thrall to the mob which had paid to dry him out after injury and drug induced depression. The mob's price for its ostensbily good deed: we own you. This black giant, bigger even than Buck, becomes a close friend of his intended victim and the virtual adopted son of Buck's mother. A tale of redemption. The footballer also helps Buck and an Indian friend track Gentry's kidnapped fiancee.

There is violent, brutal "justice," including the Atlanta mob's feeding one of its inadequate members live to hungry North Carolina hogs.

At one point, all the bad things that happen to Buck become too much to bear even for a mountain hero. Gentry is suspended from duty because of crooked politicos objecting to his breaking up the dog fight. He has had the heck beaten out of him. A madman has his girl friend. And his mother is under pressure to sell a farm nearly two centuries in the Gentry family. Is God punishing Buck for his occasional lustful sins of the flesh? No! Buck philosophizes himself back to normalcy: "Many times trouble just comes to folks" (Part IV, Ch. 2, p. 412)

Something for everyone is in BUCK GENTRY. A very impressive piece of page-burning story telling.

-OOO-

tags: rick boyer, western north carolina mountains, asheville, waynesvile, madison county, dog fighting

http://www.amazon.com/Buck-Gentry-Novel-Southern-Mountains/
dp/1570902399/ref=cm_cr-mr-title
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(5) epinions.com  reviewability requested 8/7/10

incomplete draft 8/8/10

Review Title: The great American novel? BUCK GENTRY may come close.

Product Rating:  * * * * *

Pros: Buck Gentry -  21st Century mountain man. Fatedness of THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY.

Cons: Abundance (21) of listed "major characters." Dog fighting.  Marijuana farming. Moonshine. Man-eating hogs.

The Bottom Line: The last of Rick Boyer's eleven volumes of fiction. Attractively complex, effortlessly orchestrated plot. Rounded, believable characters. Partial redemption of men apparently without hope. A heart-stopping high mountains manhunt.

aohcapablanca's Full Review: Buck Gentry


Rick Boyer, now 66 years old in 2010, produced his eleventh and perhaps final major work of fiction in the 2005 BUCK GENTRY: A NOVEL OF THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS. Its action sprawls across three western North Carolina mountain counties: my own Buncombe (seat: Asheville), Haywood, (seat: Waynesville) and Madison (seat: Marshall).

For local color of the Carolina and Tennessee mountains, both Boyer's BUCK GENTRY and THE DAISY DUCKS are as good fictitious introductions to where I live as you can find. Both are less pictorially detailed than Charles Frazier's COLD MOUNTAIN, are almost as lyrical as Sharyn McCrumb's THE HANGMAN'S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER and are more believable than Bill Forstchen's recent ONE SECOND AFTER. Boyer immerses you in the real highlands of the Carolinas.

Several stories come together that need not at all, at first blush, have involved 33-year old, physically gigantic and powerful Buckingham Ian Gentry, highly educated North Carolina wildlife ranger and, to that extent, a law enforcement officer.

-- First, Buck breaks up an illegal dog fight in Rufus Taylor's private barn in the Pigeon River valley north of Waynesville. Buck stops the event, puts one dying canine out of its misery and takes a badly wounded brindle named Funnybones to a vet to be patched up. The ranger lets everybody in the barn go their ways with no arrests. Normally that would result in no more than grumbling by participants, especially bettors on outcomes, and also some useless complaints to crooked politicians who connived at fighting. What follows, however, pulls Gentry into a spider's web full of other characters.

-- The dog Funnybones had been brought up from Atlanta by representatives of the DeStephano mob as part of a systematic effort to extend their tentacles into the Scots-Irish southern Appalachian highlands. The Atlanta hoods had made big bets. When Buck Gentry broke into the barn, dogfight emcee and betmaster Dewey Howells quickly wedged all the bet money into a niche in a wall. Later when he came to reclaim it, the hidden money was gone. Dogfight organizers then conspired to convince the out of State mobsters that lawman Buck Gentry had taken their loot. (Funnybones was the mob's imported dog and he had been winning.)

-- DeStephano sends sleazy, cowardly Sam Pine to put pressure on bootlegger and dogfight organizer Henry Timmons. Pine brings with him as intimidation Bridger Matthews, a black enforcer, ex-Auburn University pre-law student and four years defensive linebacker for the Atlanta Falcons. He is the only character physially larger than Buck Gentry.

-- One of several people in BUCK GENTRY who, with the help of Buck and others, pull themselves out of personal degradation and moral sloughs of despond, conflicted Bridger Matthews tries to extort the lost bets from Buck, starting off dealing a horrible sucker punch to Buck's back on Gentry's front porch. Fortunately for Buck, that attack enrages the fighting dog Funnybones, days earlier presented to the ranger by the veterinarian. The beast chews a hunk out of Bridger's shoulder.

-- Meanwhile in Asheville Karl Regenstreiff, an old school friend of Buck, now an environmental lawyer, is having an affair with Cynthia Gooding, wife of a real estate developer who will stop at very little to persuade Buck's widowed mother Miranda to sell him her two centuries old family farm near Waynesville to form the cornerstone of a new luxury homes development Mr Gooding is planning.

-- An insane killer of any women who remind him of his sadistic step-mother comes to Asheville to embarrass his righteous, highly respected brother, who is living in false identity. The madman falls in love with Buck's fiancee, Jennifer Hawkins, kidnaps her and flees with her into the mountains.

-- Hugo Lipe (an alias), coldly calculating killer for hire is paid by a local dogfight organizer to kill Buck. Lipe finds that the massive, hastily organized manhunt for Jennifer and her captor gives him ideal cover among men with guns and tracker dogs to pursue both Buck, two of his friends and the dog Funnybones up amid the laurels and rhododendron thickets.

-- Alvin Boxley, another old friend of the Gentrys mother and son, is now a hopeless drunk wandering the streets of Asheville. He witnesses a kidnapping of a woman later found dead. His observations, though suspect as drunks' testimony always are, lead the FBI and local law enforcement onto the track of the insane one.

-- Meanwhile the mob is displeased with the lack of success of their man Sam Pine in recovering the lost bets. They plan a rendezvous between Sam and some famished hogs.

In the course of reading BUCK GENTRY, you will learn about illegal whiskey making, illegal marijuana cultivation, see crooked politicians in action while honest lawmen do their duty competently in the face of terrible dangers.

Author Rick Perry has a knack for getting you inside the mind of of drunk panhandlers like Alvin Boxley and his derelict wino friends. You almost become the brain of a ruthless ex-Marine paid assassin; you think his thoughts; weigh his deeply detached amoral values. There are two vastly different and non-cooperating criminal minds on the prowl in BUCK GENTRY. Not to mention the pallid (by comparison) Atlanta mobsters, cruel and venal though they be.
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (1927) Thornton Wilder's Brother Juniper, a Franciscan monk, witnesses the collapse of a venerable 14th Century Inca suspension bridge in Peru. He then studies the lives of the several people who plunged to their deaths from the catastrophe, asking why God brought them all together that day to die.

Rick Boyer's BUCK GENTRY is not so overt or insistent that there is some Divine plan at work bringing the hero into contact with two murderers, two agents of an Alanta mob, various women who love him and so on. Boyer is no theologian, but he is a camera, an amateur (= amator = lover) anthropologist with sharply honed craft in noticing landscapes, people and their interplay to make some sense of all he sees.

Turn Rick Boyer loose in today's North Korea or Iran or among Afghan Taliban, and books of fiction might well emerge that would help us all intuitively grasp better those difficult places and cultures. Whatever Rick Boyer describes: Cape Cod, Robbinsville or Asheville, North Carolina, Boston, the deep woods of Maine and so much more -- it all stays in a reader's memory and imagination. No mean feat.

BUCK GENTRY is probably as close to "the great American novel" as its sadly ailing author Rick Boyer is going to come. It is unquestionably a memorable Western North Carolina mountains novel. It may not be all that far from all American greatness. You be the judge.

Thank you, category lead dramastef, for staying up late to make BUCK GENTRY accessible to readers of epinions.com.


-OOO-

http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/boyer_buckgentry.html