No Country for Old Men

Name: No Country for Old Men
Rating: 4.5 (15666 reviews)

by Cormac McCarthy

First published 2005

Amazon

4.5(15,666)

West Texas, 1980. While hunting antelope, Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss discovers the aftermath of a failed drug transaction: dead men, heroin and a case containing two million dollars. Taking the money draws him into a pursuit by Anton Chigurh, a contract killer whose rigid private logic makes negotiation impossible, while ageing sheriff Ed Tom Bell follows the widening trail of deaths across the Texas–Mexico border country.

The novel combines crime fiction with the stripped-down structure of a modern Western. The cross-border drug trade brings new wealth, weapons and professional violence into communities Bell believes he once understood, making the chase a study of chance, responsibility and an older lawman’s fear that the moral language of his generation can no longer explain the world before him.