Christopher Cook writes like an angel, and he has certainly done his homework. He paints a perfect picture of the Texas low-life - which is a level of hell all its own - and even better, he knows how to love and savour his characters. This is a terrific book. I haven't enjoyed a novel this much in years. And I can't wait for the next one

James Crumley

Bad tempers and readily available guns add up to sudden death; Christopher Cook's impressive first novel starts here. Although we come to be fond of Eddie, the least unsympathetic of the male principals in Robbers, there is no attempt to extenuate the nastiness of the murder that opens the book. Eddie, an ex-con, gets into an argument with a sales clerk about the couple of extra coins needed to buy his cigarettes and ends up shooting the man dead. Both are being unreasonable , but it is Eddie who pulls the gun.

One of Cook's many successes in this book is the way he describes the process whereby guilt changes and matures Eddie. His companion, Ray Bob, however, needs no excuse to start shooting; time and time again, as the pair drive around Texas, engaging in small-scale hold-ups, Ray Bob kills people, and Eddie worries about it. Ray Bob is a man who hates the world and himself; early traumas have rotted any capacity he has for empathy or compassion to a point where his only virtue is a notion of loyalty to his friend, a loyalty which has no interest in what his friend actually wants. Eddie was betrayed by one of his partners in an earlier crime, and Ray Bob is determined to punish that betrayal, whether Eddie wants it punished or not.

Along the road, they pick up Della, who is on the run after stabbing a violent bar pick-up, and the atmosphere between the three becomes tense. Cook writes in the tradition of noir novelists like Jim Thompson, learning from that tradition how to get the most suspense out of every stop for gas, every rushed meal of fast food. Behind them are the hunters - a psychotic gun nut whose wife Ray Bob killed along the way - and Rule Hooks, a Texas Ranger with a relaxed attitude to bringing criminals in alive; Cook has no illusions about the forces of righteousness.

Ray Bob is heading for home - in the East Texas of marshland and wet forests and river bottoms - away from where they commit their crimes in the West Texas of long dry roads and plains that blow away as dust. Robert Frost described home as where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Ray Bob is an exception to those rules - an abused child turned matricide, whose relatives are as keen as anyone to shoot him down. Cook's evocation of landscapes both literal and internal is exemplary; his tendency to link the two simplistically is a minor fault.

Like the best novels of crime and violence, Robbers offers us no easy answers; after a while, we do not want Eddie and Della to be caught and punished, nor do we want them to get away scot-free. Cook makes us believe in their love for each other, and in Eddie's potential gift as a bluesman, a gift increasingly linked to his guilt and shame for his crimes. We also do not want Rule Hooks either to succeed or to fail. Christopher Cook creates and then confuses a degree of emotional identification with the characters in a way that makes Robbers into something rather more than just a thriller.

Roz Kaveney, Times Literary Supplement

Breathless and breathtaking road thriller that follows the bloody career of two Texas drifters and a ditzy blonde who thinks she's murdered someone, speeding from the state capital Austin to the festering Gulf, with hold-ups and bodies marking their route. Justice at their heels in the shape of Texas Ranger Rule Hooks; lustful and morose, for ever on his mobile phone to the adulterous drab he's left behind. Story line that runs as straight as a bullet, but swerves into shoot-outs that take you by surprise. A genuinely stunning debut novel; violent and compulsive, barely pausing to polish its own wild poetry.

Philip Oakes, The Literary Review

For the finest contemporary thrillers, look no further than the No Exit imprint., specialists in American noir. Among their very best must be counted this novel, incredibly a first novel, set in the steamy cities, down the oily coast and deep into the swampy badlands of east Texas. Christopher Cook is a literary stylist who can spin a plot out to the crack of doom, and so he does here, as Texas Ranger (lest you thought they existed no more) Rule Hooks trails a pair of casual serial killers on their haphazard route through territory where country and cajun are heartbeats and not even the rivers run free. The dialogue is to die for, the characters are true, in shades of grey from darkest gunmetal to oiled pigeon, and the tension punishing. 'The new Elmore Leonard' shouts the cover blurb: for once it's no plamás.*

* 'Plamás' for the non-Irish readers may translate roughly as 'idle flattery'.

Carla Browne, RTE Guide

Christopher Cook's first novel, Robbers, is a full-tilt boogie of a tale that wraps nearly every genre of Texas fiction into one tightly wound bundle. It's a buddy story, a road story, a murder story, a manhunt story, a travelogue, a love story and one of best novels of contemporary Texas yet written.

The buddies are Ray Bob and Eddie, two ex-cons. Ray Bob is every decent person's nightmare, a sociopath who robs, rapes and murders without a whiff of conscience touching his brutish brain. Eddie is Ray Bob's pliable sidekick. He dreams of becoming a blues guitarist. Unnecessary murder bothers him a little, but not enough to free him from Ray Bob's thrall.

Their crime spree begins on a hot afternoon in Austin, where the footloose pals murder a 7-Eleven clerk over a penny, sexually assault a couple of UT-Austin coeds, kill a cop, then hit the road in their classic Caddy convertible, heading toward Galveston, leaving a trail of dead convenience-store and gas-station clerks in their wake.

On a roadside, they pick up Della, a sort-of-pretty blond single-mom beautician who likes to pretend she's a model. She's on the lam, too. She hates and fears Ray Bob but falls in love with Eddie and becomes a canker on the bond between the buddies.

Pursuing this trio of losers in his red Dodge pickup is Rule Hooks, a Texas Ranger who resembles Porter Wagoner and is dealing with troubles of his own. He's involved in an unsatisfying affair with the wife of a colleague, and he's trying to re-establish a fatherly relationship with a grown daughter who wants nothing to do with him.

Hooks is being trailed, too, by Harvey Lomax, a small-town reserve deputy whose wife was one of Ray Bob and Eddie's gas-station victims. Lomax, a religious fanatic with vengeance on his mind, follows Hooks in his wrecker, hoping the Ranger will lead him to the killers. Mr. Cook's gritty descriptions of the sun-blasted, fast-food-blighted, trailer-park landscape through which the Caddy and the pickup and the wrecker travel become an oil-and-rubber scented documentary of the seedy, soul-crushing Texas we've all seen flash by our car windows along the interstates.

Mr. Cook weaves in and out of the minds of his five characters, shifting points of view, guiding the reader into mental places that are terrifying in their banality and evil. And his narrative moves at such a breathless pace that for page after page he has no time for sentences, as in this description of present-day Austin on the opening page:

"Austin, state capital, university town. Former counterculture magnet and slacker haven now balling the jack on a fulltilt bender. Sucking wind under the onslaught of money, a stripmall gangbang straddling the Balcones Fault. The mellow chilled-out days mere mythic history. Silicon Gulch now, hightech hysteria and the California influx, a city overrun by cyberokies on the rebound two generations after the dustbowled western plunge, returning flush, pockets stuffed with plundered gelt."

In the second half of the story, however, Mr. Cook switches to a more traditional literary style, which slows the pace of the narrative until the two showdown scenes ­ in a Big Thicket swamp and a tacky Gulf Coast beach house ­ come across in the slow-motion style of a Sam Peckinpah bloodletting.

Blurbs on the jacket compare Robbers with the works of Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke. It's as good as anything either of those masters has written. It's a book to stay up all night with.

Bryan Woolley, Dallas Morning News