The crime was unintentional and had no witnesses. The guilty could flee the scene, dispose of the body, keep the cash, and simply walk away. But actions have consequences. And even the most perfectly executed “walkaway” is followed by a shadow. . . .
On a snowy Christmas morning in 1979, Gunther Fahnstiel, travelling with his wife, accidentally backed his RV over a stranger, killing him instantly. In the poor soul’s car was a satchel containing plane tickets, a .22 caliber pistol, a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and more money than Gunther had ever seen in his life. For the debt-ridden old couple, it would indeed be a merry Christmas. But nobody can buy a happy ending. Especially Gunther.
Ten years later, under the scorching summer sun, seventy-seven-year-old Gunther walks away from his nursing home and sets off to find the hidden money. But he is not alone: hot on his trail is a former captain of the Wichita police, who is piecing together clues for two unsolved murders; a two-timing, whore-loving local developer, who sees dollar signs if the coot is captured; Gunther’s stepson, a former bouncer turned businessman whose curiosity is peaked by his mother’s creative accounting; and that very same mother (AKA Gunther’s wife), who risks her husband’s safety to keep their secret.
As the journey unfolds and the mercury climbs, another story emerges of a U.S. soldier returning to Wichita in 1952 under an assumed name to seek vengeance on his estranged wife. The young patrolman out to protect her is none other than Gunther Fahnstiel, whose actions will reverberate in the lives of all involved nearly half a century later.
Cops on the take, jealous husbands with scores to settle, hookers scratching by, cranky curmudgeons, assorted misfits, and a ugly whore named Beulah–all play intricate roles in The Walkway. With the same flair for dark humor and crime noir that heralded his bestselling debut, Scott Phillips returns with another accomplished novel of deceit, treachery, and old-fashioned greed.
I've started separating books into three categories: ones that grab me immediately, ones that eventually hold my interest but make me work for it, ones that might be great but that throw up a wall too high for me to scale. Rereading the first twenty pages of each has helped me think about how the alchemy between author and reader is achieved. Scott Phillips's The Walkaway had me on page two. A great prologue and as a result I got far less done today than I'd planned.
If you read Scott Phillips' first novel, Ice Harvest you pretty much have to read this. It's the first appearance of my favorite Scott Phillips' character, "Wayne Ogden" -the anti-hero/heel/short-cut artist featured in The Adjustment... which pretty much serves as a prequel for this novel.
The novel picks up about 10 years after the events depicted in Ice Harvest.
An elderly man -a former cop- suffering from early-stage dementia breaks out of a nursing home. He has a particular goal in mind. If he can just stay focused he has a few loose ends to attend. What are those loose ends? They are ever changing and becoming more difficult to retain in the hours following his escape.
Pros 1. Lots of characters 2. Lots of action 3. Lots of jumping around in time 4. No Nature Boy 5. No Diversity Lessons
Cons 1. A bit hard to follow -- till you get a handle on all the characters. 2. As usual with Phillips's books, everyone is way too horny to be realistic.
It’s hard to know what to expect in a book by Scott Phillips. There will be dark humor, and there will probably be a crime, though not necessarily, and whatever crime is committed may not be strictly illegal; more of a crime against conscience. For all the unpredictability, his books never disappoint. The more you read, the more different aspects of Phillips’s insight and talent become apparent. This is never more true than in The Walkaway.
The Walkaway begins a few years after Phillips’s debut novel, The Ice Harvest, leaves off. Gunther Fahnstiel has done what he did with the money (read the book to find out exactly what), and escaped from the facility where he’s being treated for his senility. Gunther sets out with a mission, but his declining mental state keeps him from gaining a firm grasp on what it is, or how he intends to accomplish it; he just knows he has one. His escape sets his friends and relatives in a frantic chase to find him, as well as to discover how he’s been paying for some things all these years.
Set against this story are the events of over fifty years previous, when Gunther, then a cop, stood guard over a remote cabin where the winners of the sex lottery at Collins Aircraft collected their prizes. A thoroughly corrupt returning veteran, Wayne Ogden, has returned and has his own reasons for stopping that operation by whatever means necessary.
The Walkaway has Phillips’s dry, dark wit, and the writing never interferes with what he wants to say. He weaves at least three stories together with virtuosity: Gunther’s mission, the search for Gunther, and flashbacks of what transpired after the war, all of which are related. Elements of The Ice Harvest are referenced. Readers of the more recent The Adjustment will recognize Wayne Ogden, as Phillips integrated that story into seams of this one. (I hadn’t read The Walkaway when I read The Adjustment. It was a unique experience to see how he had worked the two together from the other side, so to speak.)
I had a little trouble keeping everyone straight in the beginning. Hang in there. Phillips combs out the threads of each story line from the initial ball of fabric until each character and story line has its own personality. Before long you’re shifting points of view and time periods effortlessly, fascinated as each scene brings meaning to others.
By the end I was caught up in Gunther’s story. He was what he was and did what he did earlier in life. Now he’s a confused old man who isn’t sure what he’s done or what to do about it. I’ve never read a book by Phillips I didn’t enjoy; The Walkaway is special. It contains all the things that show Phillips’s skills while probing emotions in a unsentimental manner that allows the reader to draw his own conclusions and discover his own emotions. A wonderful book.
Click off your sense of humor; lock up your thirst for the absurd; throttle your taste for slapstick; do all that and you can still find a satisfying few hours of enjoyment in "The Walkaway". But if you keep your mind open to life's quirky turns and remember to chuckle at the crazy stuff, you will find a real treasure here. Noir let loose to gambol with wacky across Kansas in the company of odd and interesting characters results in "The Walkaway". Well and tightly written, this is a delight. Recommended.
I'm not quite sure what I thought of this book. The description of the book talks about an older couple that accidentally kill a man one night, bury the body and take the huge amount of cash he had because there were no witnesses and they reckoned he was a criminal. Ten years later, the husband is in a nursing home and has walked out, presumably looking for the money he thinks he buried. The book really isn't about that at all, at least, it doesn't talk about the original event much. The husband has walked out of a nursing home. He wanders around his home town, in and out of shops and the homes of a few of the people he used to know. He is persued by his son and by the husband of the daughter of one of his exes, neither of whom are upstanding citizens.
The book jumps back to the early 1950s when he was a police officer. There is also a man who has gone AWOL from the army using the name of another officer. He's a real piece of work, hiding from his wife who is making money hooking while also bringing up a daughter. He doesn't seem to be out for any sort of revenge on her, but I'm not really sure what he was doing there.
The story was a bit confusing, jumping back and forth with no apparent point. The book really isn't about finding the old man, it's about his past and theirs and what happened then which doesn't seem to have any bearing whatsoever on the dead body/cash.
The writing itself was good, the characters well drawn out, but the plot seemed to meander. I think if you keep in mind that it's more about the events in the past rather than the premise, it makes more sense.
A completely unnecessary prequel and sequel to the author's perfect, inky-black-humored, Christmas Eve noir caper The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway still has plenty of fun to offer. The bumper crop of ne'er-do-wells that appear here -- all interconnected by family, marriage, adultery or some kind of illegal scheme -- seem never able to leave Wichita, as if the town has some kind of force field around its perimeter. So if you meet some peripheral character in 1952 Wichita, you will certainly meet that character again in 1989, still scuffling and bullshitting and scraping by. You get a blizzard of characters in the opening pages of The Walkaway, and it can be a challenge remembering who they are. There's ex's, and ex's of ex's, and grandchildren and stepkids, and business partners and co-conspirators and you get the idea.
The Ice Harvest is a laser-focused, linear account of a bunch of dirtbags all with the exact same goal (getting the money), that never wastes a word on its way to its perversely fitting climax. The Walkaway wanders all over the place. You never quite understand Wayne Ogden's motivations in the 1952 prequel half, and the 1979 sequel part (senile Gunther's travels) consists of some comic bits that never cohere into anything much. Again it's kinda fun, but you can feel the author squandering the industry goodwill he had accrued with his debut.
His second novel from a dozen years back is possibly my favorite thing I've read from the master plotter and creator of intriguing characters. This one is complicated, mixing up details from 1952, 1989, and a little bit of 1979, but boy is it ever a page turner once it gets going. Yeah, it's a crime thriller, but it's also a serious story about aging and meaning in actions small and large. And it's rip-roaringly funny in places, engagingly sad in others, and always compelling. I was sorry to have this cast of characters, even the nasty ones, out of my life at the end.
Years ago, when I first stumbled upon The Walkaway, I thought it was the source material for the Paul Newman geezer heist film, Where the Money Is. However, Newman’s second-to-last live-action film bears a little resemblance: he’s a career thief moved to a nursing home who appears to be an immobilized mute after a stroke, a crafty nurse has his number and enlists him in helping her get money to leave her dull life behind: she thinks he either has money stashed somewhere or could help her rob a bank. The coincidence introduced me to Scott Phillips’ work, the premise of his novel intrigued me more, once I made the connection to its proper cinematic roots.
Picking up where The Ice Harvest left off, Gunther Fahnstiel has a suitcase full of dirty mob cash and the body of Charlie Arglist to dispose of, after accidentally backing over him with his RV. Gunther buries the body in a gravel quarry, the only other person who knows about the body and the windfall is his third wife, Dot. The narrative jumps to ten years later, Gunther’s been placed in an elder care facility because his advanced senility requires supervision. On a quest to get a haircut, Gunther wanders through downtown Wichita where everyone and everything familiar to him seems to be misplaced or different than he last remembered. Fading memories, the inescapability of life moving by, Gunther’s thoughts drift from his misdeeds as a morally flexible lawman in 1952 protecting his lover from her psychopath husband after he returns from a stint in the military, to where he hid the money.
Several people are in pursuit of Gunther. Ed Dietrele, a retired detective sergeant who has a lifelong habit of watching Gunther’s back, who returned to help, as well as get answers about a few mysteries plaguing him surrounding the events of the strip club slayings years ago; Gunther’s step-son, Sidney McCallum, who put up a $12,000 reward, his way of repaying Gunther for giving him the money to buy the strip club he runs; local knucklehead, Eric Gandy who’s hoping to cash in if he can only manage to stay sober enough to stay one step ahead everyone else.
Propelled by the connective tissues of an ensemble and their intertwined subplots, what always made The Walkaway stand out was the way it worked as a shaggy dog detective story complicated by cunningly crafted deceptions and misunderstandings rooted in knotted family trees. Operating as a prequel/sequel, Phillips crafted a sepia-toned crime story with characters haunted by melancholy and regret, who deftly pivot from moments of slapstick to chilling menace.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking about Paul Newman a lot lately, or the affable, sometimes sly way Gunther handles even the most awkward missteps, reminds me a lot Newman’s late-career roles. Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but imagine what could’ve been if Newman took one last chance on another dark role before enjoying retirement. I can’t help but think the way Phillips captures the rhythms of the day-to-day life of small towns with an eye towards the absurd, where secrets are traded, and the seedy underbelly goes nearly undetected, would have appealed to Newman’s sensibilities. Despite popular thinking, there aren’t more innocents in the less densely populated parts of the country, just more room to bury secrets.
After reading Scott Phillips’ The Ice Harvest, I had to read The Walkaway. The latter book covers much of the same ground - it’s a witty, well-written crime novel set in Wichita, Kansas. Phillips is a good writer with a deft sense of pacing, a dry wit, and an ability to tie a complex plot together.
The Walkaway is both a sequel AND a prequel to The Ice Harvest - part of the action takes place in 1952 and part of it occurs in 1989. The book centers on Gunther Fahnstiel, a retired police officer who is living in a nursing home in 1989. Fahnstiel’s mental abilities are slipping and he wanders away from the home. The thread from 1952 centers on Wayne Ogden, a vicious ex-soldier who comes to Wichita to get back at those who have wronged him.
The complexities of the plot can make The Walkaway a challenge. At times, the reader has the sense of working too hard to try keep the cast and the plot straight. There were times when Phillips slips into the cliches of contemporary fiction. Specifically, he belittles the square people of Wichita for their religion and their conservative values.
Still, I really liked The Walkaway. It’s a clever sequel that I plowed through in about 48 hours. I found my copy at the Mobile Public Library. If they have the third book in the series (The Adjustment), I’m going to have to read it as well.
Once again filled with crass, belligerent, no account rounders and cheating husbands, whores and cops on the take, this is more of Phillips’ typical hard-boiled, period crime writing. However, in that it jumps from the early ‘50’s to the present with chapters providing uneven contributions to moving the plot along, it is a somewhat unsatisfying read, all said.
Even having read his earlier novels, I had trouble following the story to the degree that I could really enjoy it. Those who have not read his earlier Kansas novels will find some of the references meaningless or even baffling.
Maybe 2.5 stars is a fairer rating and, while I’m sure his disenchanted, flawed characters are a damn sight more realistic than those depicted in Disney’s version of post-WWII America, I’ve had enough of Phillips for now.
Very well written, much in the style of Ross Thomas. Dry, dry humour. But he keeps you flipping the pages. Only criticism I can think of is, I wish he had a character list, a la the old Agatha Christies. He introduces the characters quickly with no real intro, and it took me a while to work out who was whom.
Phillips is an entertaining raconteur and the evocation of place illuminates all of this book but I can't say I followed it all very well. Two alternating timelines and a bus station-full of characters (no matter how colorful) constitute the ambitious undertaking at play here. Even so I stumbled through it more or less happily -- admiring the author's loyalty to his characters.
Lots going on in this book. Sometimes you forget where you are, who is connected to who and who is who. You really need to take notes in the beginning so you know what is what to assist you in following the book .
Few American terms I had to look up - duckblind? etc but you get the gist.
2.5. Should have read the reviews recommending that I read Ice Harvest first. Character laden and confusing - both of which seem to be the author’s own devices, along with a blurb that sets up the story but is never actually written about. Confusing review? Not as confusing as the book!
This book was well-written seem to be a bit all over the place. It had some good parts but overall I can't give it a high recommendation as it seemed to be missing something. I am just not sure what it was missing from getting to the must read category.
well-paced, darker, prequel/sequel to the ice harvest. i’m not sure that the eponymous character is entirely believable, but i certainly did enjoy his (later) exploits.
I can’t really recommend this book. I hate to say that because I like the way Scott Phillips writes and I enjoyed both his previous books. There were too many characters in this book for me to keep track of. One character was using two different names at different times. Some chapters were written in the third person and others were in the first person. When writing in the first person it wasn’t always the same character. There were many flash backs also and it was difficult for me to keep track of what time period he was talking about. It was a difficult read for me.
It had potential? There were just SOOOOO many characters to keep track of. After about Chapter 2, I wanted to make a family tree since I knew they were all intertwined and knowing who they were related to should become relevant at some point but.....the story would've been better if there weren't so many people.
Don't try to read this without reading the prequel, "Ice Harvest," first. Otherwise "Walkaway" doesn't make any sense. The author's third book, "Cottonwood" is much better.