Book: No Country For Old Men
Sun Apr 28 2024
Started: November 2024
Finished: November 2024
Review: 5/5
Short read but vividly rendered, extremely dark and captivating.
Recap
Llewlyn Moss chances upon some shot up trucks from a drug deal gone bad. He finds a briefcase full of cash and brings it home. Foolishly, he returns to kill the last survivor but is found out so he’s put on the run by the drug gangs as well as the hit man Anton Chigurh. Chigurh famously uses a caddle-killing pneumatic stun gun to kill bystanders as well as open locks.
The county sherriff, Ed Tom Bell, is trying as well to track Moss and solve the growing number of murders. He reflects throughout the book on how bad things are getting in America. Much of the book is Bell coming across all the crime scenes after the fact.
Llewlyn sends his wife to Odessa and himself travels elsewhere but realizes the briefcase has a tracker. Chigurh and the Mexican gangs are both trying to get to Moss but Chigurh keeps killing the Mexicans. There’s a big shootout in Eagle Pass at a hotel where Moss and Chigurh injure each other. Moss crosses into a town in Mexico and ends up in a hospital there while Chigurh self medicates.
Moss is visited in hospital by Carson Wells, a man working for the US-side drug runners who are trying to get their money back. He tells him about Chigurh and offers to make a deal. Wells later tries to kill Chigurh but is himself killed instead. Moss calls Wells but ends up talking to Chigurh. Chigurh offers to spare his wife in return for giving up the money but Moss refuses.
Moss picks up a hitchhiker, a young girl. While in a motel they’re found by the Mexican gangsters and both are killed in a shootout. Bell almost runs into Chigurh at the motel when Chigurh comes to collect the case, hidden by Moss in an air duct.
Chigurh comes back to kill Moss’ widowed wife, saying he offered Moss a deal to spare her but was refused. He’s a cold blooded and psycopathic killer. On his way out he’s randomly T-bone’d at a stop sign by high teenagers. He limps away, badly injured but not discovered by police.
At the end Bell quits his position. He confesses to his uncle that the commendation he received in world war 2 was based on a false story, and actually he abandoned his comrades to die.