THE SISTERS BROTHERS by Patrick deWitt

Eli and Charlie Sisters are hit men for the Commodore during the California Gold Rush.  Eli narrates their adventures in search of their next target, Hermann Warm, but Charlie is the boss and the more lethal of the two brothers.  They basically spare no one on their journey to Warm’s camp, and all this bloodshed seemed a bit gratuitous to me.  Anyway, Eli is ready to quit the business after this last job (where have we heard this before?), and he’s a bit of a softie, considering his line of work.  He passes up the opportunity for a better horse, even though his horse Tub lives up to his name in that he’s not swift of foot.  After Tub’s eye gets bashed in, Eli starts to feel guilty about his treatment of Tub but shows no remorse for the men he and Charlie have murdered.  Charlie rationalizes that those men were all bad anyway, but Warm does not fit the pattern at all.  He’s an inventor with a formula for making gold dust more visible in water, and the Commodore insists that Charlie and Eli obtain the formula before they kill Warm.  Warm and the Commodore’s scout, Henry Morris, have joined forces and found that the formula has grisly, unexpected side effects that change the course of their whole enterprise, not to mention the Sisters brothers plans.  This book is supposed to be darkly comic, but for me it was dark but not comic, especially the crude surgery on poor Tub’s eye.  I guess I felt more sympathy for the horse than the people, too, because the people are mostly despicable, after all.  Still, the story moves at a good pace, and Eli’s deadpan narration is engaging, comic or not.