Revolver (review)

Einar Andersson was luckier than most of the fortune hunters who made their way to the Nome gold rush in 1899; at the very point when he and his family faced starvation, he was offered employment as an assayer. His good fortune held out for eleven years as he plied his trade around the Arctic region, ending up in Giron, Sweden. But it's all over now; Einar has frozen to death while crossing thin ice on an area he knew well enough to avoid, and his teenaged son Sig is alone in the cabin with his father's body while his sister and stepmother go for help. A brutish hulk of a man named Gunther Wolff barges into the cabin and demands his share of money he claims was promised to him by Einar, and as Wolff becomes ever more agitated and threatening, Sig begins to piece together information and memories that lead him to understand that Einar had been embezzling from his employers and running with his family for years to avoid the day of reckoning from his blackmailer, Wolff. As Wolff holds a late-model Colt revolver on the boy and, later, his sister, Sig schemes to retrieve his father's aged Colt from a storeroom and even their odds against their tormentor. Chapters alternate between the story of Einar's past and Sig's present and bring the two threads slowly into a cohesive whole, and the battle of wills between Sig and Wolff that plays out in the claustrophobic confines of a remote cabin and on a vast expanse of cracking ice is a masterwork of pure tension. The firearms themselves, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, become characters in their own right, and readers are compelled to ponder along with Sig whether the revolver is a life-saving equalizer or an invitation to violence.