No Good Brother
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILBUR SMITH ADVENTURE WRITING PRIZE 2018'A great, gripping story, ferociously well-written, with characters that live and breathe' STEF PENNEY, bestselling author of Under a Pole StarThe Coen Brothers meets Patrick deWitt in this glorious novel from award-winning author Tyler Keevil: a high-stakes adventure of love, loss and morality, introducing two unlikely outlaws…Tim Harding has spent the fishing season in Canada working as a deckhand, making an honest living. When his hot-headed younger brother tracks him down at the shipyards in Vancouver, Tim senses trouble. Jake is a drifter, a dreamer, an ex-con, and now he needs help in repaying a debt to the notorious Delaney gang.So begins an epic, unpredictable odyssey across land and sea as the brothers journey down to the Delaney’s ranch in the U.S., chased by customs officials, freak storms and the gnawing feeling that their luck is about to run out. But while they may be able to outrun the law, there’s no escaping the ghosts of their tragic family past and neither is prepared for who and what awaits them at the other end…
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NO GOOD BROTHER
Tyler Keevil
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Tyler Keevil asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Tyler Keevil 2018
Excerpt from 'Highway Patrolman' by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1982 Bruce Springsteen (Global Music Rights). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photographs © Tim Robinson/Arcangel Images (man); Valeriy Shvestsov/Arcangel Images (man with horse mask); Shutterstock.com (all other images)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008228880
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008228903
Version: 2018-10-16
‘Keevil’s writing is unmissable . . . quite simply a brilliant writer’
Viv Groskop, author of The Anna Karenina Fix
‘No Good Brother is a paean to brotherly loyalty and a meditation on the things we can change and the things we must learn to love regardless. It is also the funniest and most exciting book I’ve read in years. A grand adventure in the spirit of Mark Twain, it is reckless and wild and beautiful, like something dreamed up by Cormac McCarthy and Hunter S Thompson on a drunken camping trip. It’s as big and as perfect as the prairie sky’
D.D. Johnston, author of Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs
‘A tender and at turns thrilling novel about grief and the way it seeps unshakably into the lives of the living. Keevil’s storytelling is both elegant and meaty and his prose stunning as per; I could almost taste the bitter sea air of Vancouver’s North Shore’
Rachel Trezise, author of Fresh Apples
‘Quite a story. Keevil’s prose proceeds with the laconic madness of a patient horse, and the same ability to buck and kick’
Cynan Jones, author of The Dig
For my brother
‘For I know that in me, that is,
in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.’
Romans 7:18a
‘Man turns his back on his family,
well he just ain’t no good.’
Bruce Springsteen
Table of Contents
The end of this story is pretty well known, since people wound up getting killed and the trials were in the news. My brother Jake was portrayed in a lot of different ways. Some said he was just a patsy who had gotten caught up in the scheme of these upstart gangsters. Others said he did it for the money. Then there were the ones who actually believed he was an activist of some sort, or a gentleman robber, and I suppose it was easy to sympathize with that on account of what happened to him. But none of those versions is true, or entirely true. I intend to tell it straight and lay out how it all happened, and how I became involved.
It started when Jake showed up at the Westco plant and boatyard, the day we got back from herring season. That was the end of February, last year. A Monday. I was standing at the stern of the Western Lady across from Sugar, this giant Haida guy who shares the licence with Albert, the skipper. Sugar and I were the ones working the hold, but we had to wait around in the drizzling cold for the plant workers to get the hose and Transvac pump in place and line up the sorting bins. They were union guys and on the clock and in no hurry. Albert was up top, directing them from the wheelhouse.
