The Painter - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Peter Heller (Paperback)

About the Book

Years ago, a well-known expressionist painter named Jim Stegner shot a man in a bar. The man lived, Jim served his time, and he has learned to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Jim enjoys a quiet life in the valleys of Colorado. He works with a lovely model, he doesn't drink, he goes fly fishing in the evenings. His paintings fetch excellent prices at a posh gallery in Santa Fe. He is--if he can admit it--almost happy. One day, driving down a dirt road, Jim sees a man beating a small horse. Jim leaps out of the truck, tackles the man, and bloodies his nose. The man is Dell, a cruel hunting outfitter notorious among locals. Jim cannot shake his rage over the little horse. The next night, under a full moon, telling himself he is just going night fishing, he returns to the creek where Dell has his camp and kills him. As Jim tries to come to terms with what he has done, he must evade the police, navigate his own conscience, and escape the members of Dell's clan set on revenge. And he paints the whole time; trying to make sense of his actions.

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the national bestselling author of The River and The Dog Stars comes a "carefully composed story about one man's downward turning life in the American West" (The Boston Globe).

After having shot a man in a Santa Fe bar, the famous artist Jim Stegner served his time and has since struggled to manage the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Now he lives a quiet life ... until the day that he comes across a hunting guide beating a small horse, and a brutal act of new violence rips his quiet life right open. Pursued by men dead set on retribution, Jim is left with no choice but to return to New Mexico and the high-profile life he left behind, where he'll reckon with past deeds and the dark shadows in his own heart.

Review Quotes

An Oprah.com "Must-Read" Book

"Breathtakingly good. . . A darkly suspenseful page turner." --The Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Suspense with literary chops. . . . A brilliant page-turner about an artist with a dark streak." --Reader's Digest

"A moving story about love, celebrity, and the redemptive power of art." --The New York Times Book Review

"Heart-thumping . . . culminating in an ingeniously played final twist." --The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"A taut tale of anger, revenge and inspiration." --Dallas Morning News

"Amazing. . . . The contrast between serene nature and extreme action made The Dog Stars such a sensation. Heller uses it again well in The Painter." --The Miami Herald

"[A] carefully composed story about one man's downward turning life in the American West. . . . Beautiful near-visionary descriptions." --The Boston Globe

"[Heller's] stories are of a classic type: unusual men, the kind we can identify with even if we're not painters or pilots, thrust into unusual, even tragic situations. Yet at heart, these men are not so different than those we know." --Santa Fe New Mexican

"The Colorado and New Mexico landscapes evoked in The Painter give the novel a deeper than usual sense of place." --The New York Times

"More than a little wondrous. . . . [Heller's] writing is strong and sure, at turns fizzy and sensual, dark and brooding, as filled with love as it is with suspense. This is stuff you'll taste in the back of your throat and feel at your nerves' ends." --Jackson Free Press

"Jim Stegner may be a mess of a man, but it's fascinating watching Heller plumb his broken soul." --Salt Lake City Weekly

"Offers modern twists on the ancient themes of family, duty, revenge, and justice. . . . Heller creates in Stegner a . . . flawed, reflective, and fully realized protagonist." --Outside Magazine

"The Painter achieves the rare alchemy that makes it simultaneously an intellectually provocative literary novel and a pace-quickening thriller. . . . Compulsively readable . . . Heller gives you everything you could hope for in a great summer novel." --Nashville Scene

"Whether you read this novel for the plot or appreciate it for poetic insights into the human condition, either way, you'll be glad you did." --Wichita Public Radio

"The ghost of [Hemingway] drifts through the novel, in style and subject matter. Heller, however, has his own voice." --The Columbus Dispatch

"At times suspenseful, at times melancholy, at times spiritual, but always engrossing." --Library Journal (starred)

"A good book about being bad. . . .The Painter is a dark relative of David James Duncan's The River. . . . Vividly American. . . . Tremendously ambitious, a well-landed punch on the side of rugged masculinity." --Washington Independent Review of Books

"[A] masterful novel, in which love (parental and romantic), artistic vision, guilt, grief, and spine-chilling danger propel a suspenseful plot." --Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Heller's writing is sure-footed and rip-roaring, star-bright and laced with 'dark yearning, ' coalescing in an ever-escalating, ravishing, grandly engrossing and satisfying tale of righteousness and revenge, artistic fervor and moral ambiguity." --Booklist (starred)

About the Author

Peter Heller is the best-selling author of The Dog Stars. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in both fiction and poetry. An award-winning adventure writer and a longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men's Journal, and National Geographic Adventure, and a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Kook, The Whale Warriors, and Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet's Tsangpo River. He lives in Denver, Colorado.