In the mystery genre, it would be hard to think of an author with a more unique style signature, save one, and more about her later. The language here is the pure idiom of uncultured Texas, in an impoverished county along the Rio Grande. McCarthy uses no punctuation, in a style where thoughts and speech go unseparated except by the "he said, he replied" formulation. And, finally, he takes liberties with structural convention that, I think, hurts the essential power of the narrative.

The time is 1980 and the drug wars across the border are almost out of control. The county is under the authority of Sheriff Bell, a highly regarded, thoughtful man of the law. Llewelyn Moss, a local who makes a living for himself and wife by welding, sets out to hunt antelope near the river when he's suddenly astonished by a scene of devastation. Approaching cautiously, he recognizes that the three vehicles, big trucks, SUVs, and dead men is the aftermath of a shootout -- a drug deal gone bad. Guns and ammunition are everywhere, cars pocked with bullets, and a lone survivor, a Mexican man surrounded by bags of heroin and trapped behind the wheel of his vehicle.

The man pleads for water. As he's still breathing, Moss's analysis of the scene suggests another gunman outside this ring of death, higher up. His tracking brings him to that man, quite dead, and guarding the other part of the drug deal, a satchel containing about $2 million in currency.

Moss leaves the dope and takes the money home. Late that night he returns in his truck to the scene with a jug of water. But, he's not alone out on the prairie. Associates of one side of the deal are there and when he returns to his truck, they're looking it over, sniffing it out. He backs away, but they sense him and follow, relentlessly, in their truck and on foot, shooting all the way.

Moss, a Vietnam veteran with special training and a marksman, finally mangages to elude his pursuers and returns home on foot realizing the gravity of his situation. These people are hardly going to give up on their quest to find him and their money.

When the shootout scene is brought to Sheriff Bell's attention, he interviews Moss and realizes how much protection his citizen is going to need. But, by this time, one side in the failed transaction has hired Chigurh (Shi-gur?), an ex-Special Forces officer turned into a savage killer-tracker with skills that are at least as good as Moss's and much more savage. Early on we learn that his decision to murder turns on little more than a coin toss. From opposing ends of the morality scale, these two are destined to meet.

The preparation for the inevitable confrontation includes the oversight and philosophies of the Sheriff, whose thoughts (in italics) work as an observing chorus over the life-and-death calculations and movements of the principles involved. The story includes a virtuosic range of weaponry: a nickel-plated government .45 automatic, a nine millimeter parabellum, a pistol with a hairspray-can silencer, a stun gun (for unlocking doors), an Uzi, a stainless steel .357 revolver, a Tec-9 semiautomatic, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30 calibre machine-gun and a rifle.

Author McCarthy, however, isn't just trying to impress us with his armory knowledge. He does it, rather, with his perfection of idiomatic language of the area and the dread mood of a destiny that's as harsh and unabatable as a coyote's hunger. You might not like the unconventional resolution any more than I did, nor on the focus of a character who I thought should have been maintained as peripheral, but McCarthy's description of two uncompromising forces leaves an overpowering and indelible impression.

A sidenote of some fascination is the fact that Annie Proulx, whose use of idiomatic language and unparalleled choices in character, might have been the model for McCarthy, wrote a review of this book for the Guardian Unlimited, which she aptly calls, "Gunning for Trouble." I'm going to tell you right now, it's a better review and, certainly, more authoritative.