The Sisters Brothers

I recently paused my reading of War and Peace to take a gander at The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. A sharp, cleanly written Western/dark comedy, we follow hired killers Charlie and Eli Sister from Oregon City down to California to kill a man named Herman Kermit Warm. The novel is told in the dry first-person voice of Eli Sister, the girthier, kinder of the two brothers:

"We rode along in silence, thinking our private thoughts. Charlie and I had an unspoken agreement not to throw ourselves into speedy travel just after a meal. There were many hardships to our type of life and took these small comforts as they came; I found they added up to something decent enough to carry on."

This is a one damn thing after another type adventure story, with plenty of eccentric characters, gun fights, and bears. I read it in about two days.