I listened to this book on one of those new Play Away "book on a chip" devices. I'm not sure I would have plowed through all the bloody gunfights otherwise. Cormack McCarthy has written a book No Country for Old Men that brings all the elements of the wild west, gang fights, drug wars, war veterans, and retribution morality. In fact the final quarter of the book seemed to me to be the ramblings of an aging sheriff who intends to hang up his badge and is sort of balancing the ledger in his mind as he does so. He admits that he couldn't possibly bring all the criminals in his jurisdiction to justice and the best he could hope for was to scare them enough that they'd go somewhere else.The gunfight scenes seemed oddly unmatched with equal parts rifles, submachine guns, and sawed off shotguns. Oh, and the main baddy uses an air driven bolt that is normally used to put down cattle before they're butchered. It punches a 3/4 inch diameter hole about 2 inches into the cranium effectively killing the cow (and in this story, men) without the blood, gore, sound, and smoke of a bullet. It also works nicely in punching out door lock cylinders.
The relentless successes of Chigurh and his ability to come back from near death make the book more science fiction or fantasy than anything else. Otherwise I would have enjoyed it more.
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