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Description:
Jimmy
Roy Guy and Rita Whitelaw are itinerant gun dealers, traveling the
gun show circuit in the Pacific Northwest, buying and selling weapons
with significan -- sometimes notorious -- histories. Jimmy is also
a storyteller of a most unusual kind. Drawing his inspiration from
the guns that pass through his hands, he creates elaborate, amazingly
detailed fictions, and offers those fictions to an audience of one:
Rita.
In
an otherwise unremarkable gun show in Issaquah, Washington, Jimmy
acquires a vintage Colt .45 Model 1911 from the recently widowed Loretta
Snow. The Colt once belonged to a racist "freedom fighter" named Bob
Champion, who has since become the patron saint of a demented cadre
of right-wing militiamen. Once in Jimmy’s hands, the gun begins projecting
an entirely new history, providing him with the outline of an exotic
narrative of love, murder, and ungovernable passion set in the vividly
evoked Cuba of nearly a century ago. As the narrative develops, it
quickly takes on a life of its own, drawing Jimmy, Rita, and a number
of unsuspecting bystanders into its bizarre, ultimately lethal, depths.
Colonel
Rutherford’s Colt is a short, powerful novel featuring one of the
most unique protagonists in modern fiction. Its interlocking narratives,
which are alternately funny, sexy, horrifying, and perverse, create
a wholly believable universe in which the boundaries separating the
fictional from the real become increasingly difficult to discern.
Writing with passion, humor, and absolute authority, Shepard has given
us a remarkable story about stories themselves: the mysterious places
they come from, and the equally mysterious effects they can have when
they find their way into the world.
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