Peter Heller, the celebrated author of the breakout best seller The Dog Stars, returns with an achingly beautiful, wildly suspenseful second novel about an artist trying to outrun his past.
Jim Stegner has seen his share of violence and loss. Years ago he shot a man in a bar. His marriage disintegrated. He grieved the one thing he loved. In the wake of tragedy, Jim, a well-known expressionist painter, abandoned the art scene of Santa Fe to start fresh in the valleys of rural Colorado. Now he spends his days painting and fly-fishing, trying to find a way to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. He works with a lovely model. His paintings fetch excellent prices. But one afternoon, on a dirt road, Jim comes across a man beating a small horse, and a brutal encounter rips his quiet life wide open. Fleeing Colorado, chased by men set on retribution, Jim returns to New Mexico, tormented by his own relentless conscience.
A stunning, savage novel of art and violence, love and grief, The Painter is the story of a man who longs to transcend the shadows in his heart, a man intent on using the losses he has suffered to create a meaningful life.
"Breathtakingly good. . . A darkly suspenseful page turner." --The Richmond Times-Dispatch
"Suspense with literary chops. . . . A brilliant page-turner about an artist with a dark streak."
--Reader's Digest "A moving story about love, celebrity, and the redemptive power of art." --
The New York Times Book Review "Heart-thumping . . . culminating in an ingeniously played final twist." --
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "A taut tale of anger, revenge and inspiration." --
Dallas Morning News "Amazing. . . . The contrast between serene nature and extreme action made
The Dog Stars such a sensation. Heller uses it again well in
The Painter." --
The Miami Herald "[A] carefully composed story about one man's downward turning life in the American West. . . . Beautiful near-visionary descriptions." --
The Boston Globe "[Heller's] stories are of a classic type: unusual men, the kind we can identify with even if we're not painters or pilots, thrust into unusual, even tragic situations. Yet at heart, these men are not so different than those we know." --
Santa Fe New Mexican "The Colorado and New Mexico landscapes evoked in
The Painter give the novel a deeper than usual sense of place." --
The New York Times "More than a little wondrous. . . . [Heller's] writing is strong and sure, at turns fizzy and sensual, dark and brooding, as filled with love as it is with suspense. This is stuff you'll taste in the back of your throat and feel at your nerves' ends."
--Jackson Free Press "Jim Stegner may be a mess of a man, but it's fascinating watching Heller plumb his broken soul." --
Salt Lake City Weekly "Offers modern twists on the ancient themes of family, duty, revenge, and justice. . . . Heller creates in Stegner a . . . flawed, reflective, and fully realized protagonist." --
Outside Magazine "
The Painter achieves the rare alchemy that makes it simultaneously an intellectually provocative literary novel and a pace-quickening thriller. . . . Compulsively readable . . . Heller gives you everything you could hope for in a great summer novel." --
Nashville Scene "Whether you read this novel for the plot or appreciate it for poetic insights into the human condition, either way, you'll be glad you did." --
Wichita Public Radio "The ghost of [Hemingway] drifts through the novel, in style and subject matter. Heller, however, has his own voice." --
The Columbus Dispatch
"At times suspenseful, at times melancholy, at times spiritual, but always engrossing." --
Library Journal (starred)
"A good book about being bad. . . .
The Painter is a dark relative of David James Duncan's
The River. . . . Vividly American
. . . . Tremendously ambitious, a well-landed punch on the side of rugged masculinity.
" --
Washington Independent Review of Books "[A] masterful novel, in which love (parental and romantic), artistic vision, guilt, grief, and spine-chilling danger propel a suspenseful plot." --
Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Heller's writing is sure-footed and rip-roaring, star-bright and laced with 'dark yearning, ' coalescing in an ever-escalating, ravishing, grandly engrossing and satisfying tale of righteousness and revenge, artistic fervor and moral ambiguity."
--Booklist (starred)
