Ordinary Bear

This extraordinary novel is sadly currently not published in Europe, but was released earlier this year in America. I picked up a copy during the recent New Orleans Bouchercon thanks to the book receiving a Deadly Pleasures Barry Award, and excellent word of mouth in America.

I was energised by this novel, an unexpected treat, full of heart but a very tough and hard hitting literary thriller. Ordinary Bear provoked deep reflection and contemplation as the pages turned and the tale was told.

Ostensibly, its theme is redemption but the narrative is far more than purely a journey for the main character Farley to find inner-peace. The narrative weaves the former army veteran from working as an oil-field detective in Nanuqmiut [a small village in Alaska], to the homeless tented camps in contemporary Portland, Oregon.  

Eponymously titled, it could be Farley who is the Ordinary Bear due to the detective’s hulking appearance [and nature], or it could be the wild animal that took away the oil-field detective’s reason to live.

Farley travels down the American South West, from Alaska to Portland – the city that raised him. He is looking for pain, for sensations to numb his body from the horrific nightmares trapped within his mind following a savage Polar Bear attack. Hospitalisation and months of painful recovery has left his body scarred and torn – however it is the memories of what happened to his daughter Adril and friend Pastor John McTeague that prove worse than his physical wounds.  These memories and screams tear at his consciousness, piercing his sanity and destroying his self-worth.

Scorned by his ex-wife Nirva, and tormented by Rebecca [the Pastor’s wife] by screaming telephone calls – he feels the full weight of blame resting firmly on his shoulders, compressing his will to live into a void space.

Seeking refuge from the guilt - he finds penance in sleeping rough in a Portland tented community instead of the modest apartment he has rented nearby. He accidentally befriends a struggling single mother Lissa [‘Alissa’], who works as a veterinary technician at Portland Zoo and her daughter Olive. Farley intervenes during an altercation at the nearby homeless tent-city community between Lissa and Olive with a dangerous drug dealer named Kevin Asher [but known infamously as either ‘the Ferryman’ or ‘the asshole’] and his dog ‘Smoke’. A sequence of disturbing events are set into motion following the altercation.

Farley is forced to shake off his depression, positioning himself as Lissa and Olive’s private detective-cum-revenge agent. The giant bear of a man Farley then disappears into Portland’s underground searching to slake his redemption-cum-revenge.

Featuring short chapters, with action so vivid it forces you to read as if in a trance; the author navigates an unfamiliar landscape with a horde of odd-ball characters – each more bizarre than the last. We have Lady McDeath and her roller-derby skaters, Pot-smoking Sister Isiah and her soup kitchen staff, then there’s Edge [aka George Edgeworthy] who fate handed a bum deal, and the cross-dressing former Army Veteran – turned bartender, Dolly – I could go on. There is dark humour among the shadows and misfits that line this novels’ jagged perimeter ensuring the narrative is propelled with a dynamic but measured pace.

The authors ‘voice’ is robust and assured, navigating the reader through Farley’s journey making the encounters thought-provoking - as bullets and bones are crunched, and the various characters vie for the readers attention – each painted distinctly with deft literary flourishes.  

The closing encounter with the homeless Ferryman and his reluctant sidekick Wayne is extremely violent [and curiously funny], but makes the reader ponder as to what makes them ‘bad people’. Life has a way of dirtying the surface of [some of] our lives, so we should look beneath the grime to try to understand why the person has been stained.

Rarely does one receive such a wonderfully realised literary thriller, one that is sleek like a ricocheting bullet – but one that makes the reader contemplate life-and-death, fear-and-love, cause-and-effect in a world that perplexes us further with each passing day.

Hugely recommended even if one has to order from America.  

One of my top reads of 2025, so far [and I read a lot of books].