Review: The Detour by Travis Pearson

In The Detour, a new novel by rising author Travis Pearson, readers are led down the dark roads of America into a nearly forgotten town, where evil is not only pervasive, but also boasts a badge.

The story starts innocently enough, as recently unemployed Dan Icor decides to take a trip across the country to clear his mind and figure out his next steps. However, it’s not long before the novel takes a savage turn, as Dan must defend an innocent Native American family from a brutal gang of local thugs at a gas station. In the process, Dan is badly wounded and is unable to leave town, but in the space of that single attack, he makes a number of powerful enemies. The town is in the grips of a political juggernaut, Clay Carter, a cruel and ruthless man whose family controls the sheriff’s office, the local muscle, and has their eyes set on taking over the bank.

Given Dan’s unemployment and recovery process, he decides to stick around, and with his previous experience as an executive trainee at a bank back east, he lands a new job. He soon realizes that the Carter clan, controlling everything and everyone in town, is only interested in dominance and money, and are not afraid to intimidate, cheat, lie and kill to achieve their ends. Dan Icor may have just been passing through, but this battle for the soul of the town quickly becomes the fight of Dan’s life.

Far from being a straightforward crime novel, the twist to this tale is that the intrepid hero begins to develop certain abilities after his initial injury, powers that could help him turn the tide against the sinister men threatening to swallow the town whole. Combining gritty Americana writing with a supernatural edge, The Detour is an unpredictable ride with stark parallels to our present situation. The financial crisis of 2008 still looms large in many minds, and this depiction of an entire town being misled or mistreated by greedy men is disturbingly relatable.

The writing is very straightforward and declarative, with few uses of imagery or other literary tools. Pearson has a tendency to tell readers precisely what is happening, rather than showing the action in an interesting or engaging way. This type of heavy-handed narration is present throughout much of the book, which can make the reading experience somewhat tedious, as there is little for readers to discover for themselves. Additionally, the protagonist himself is fairly static, even with his expanded abilities. He is no doubt heroic and honorable from the start, but he rarely shows more than one side to his personality, making it harder for the reader to track his growth and motivation.

That said, there is much to recommend The Detour, as its sense of place makes up for some of the deficiencies in character development. Small-town America may seem like something of a bygone era, but it has often been an effective setting for crime fiction, and couching this story in a well-defined and recent period of history lends the whole novel more power and timely significance.

On the whole, The Detour is a harrowing and darkly entertaining story of good vs. evil with an interesting supernatural spin, and a small-town setting that is at once nostalgic and an indictment of the present day.