Book: Red Is the Fastest Color

Bozeman author Dave Carty’s new novel, Red Is the Fastest Color (Guernica, $18), may not start out overly sanguine, but it gradually gains velocity, and by the end it’s a rosy-red barn-burner. Set in the slow-moving Shields Valley, the story’s real action is inside the hearts of its characters: a reticent retiree from the Midwest, his ailing sister, her uninhibited husband, and an endearing mélange of local townsfolk. Like the stark, beautiful landscape between the Bridger and Crazy mountains, Carty’s writing is both sparse and effulgent, with metaphors sharper than the Crazies’ knife-edge ridgelines and descriptions as mellifluous as the serpentine Shields River, which flows through the lives of the characters like time itself. Good writing is a joy to read, and good fiction is art; Carty delivers both, moving the reader’s head and heart in time with the complex crucible that finally unravels at the end.