Review of UK Edition

Uncut Magazine June 2001

'This is my kind of book!' announces an excited James Ellroy on the back cover of Christopher Cook's Robbers, a brilliant debut that also comes with a salivating endorsement from James Crumley, and which reads like Natural Born Killers written by Cormac McCarthy as a rhapsodic hymn to random violence. Eddie and Ray Bob are two tearaways turned hardened cold-blooded murderers, who - for no other reason than having not much better to do - go on a killing spree, leaving blood and bodies from Austin to Houston, Galveston to the spooky East Texas bottomlands, with Texas ranger Rule Hooks in grim and determined pursuit.

What could have been a familiar narrative - reckless shooters hunted by noble lawman - is given several notable twists by Cook, who uses the chase to reveal increasingly contradictory aspects of the characters most central to this blood-soaked drama. By the time we get to the remote bottomlands - home to a clan of homicidal backwoods lunatics - we are truly in a strange and disturbing world, one that even the driven Rule Hooks will discover is a formidable fastness.

Reviewed by Allan Jones

Robbers by Christopher Cook - Main Page