Review by Ian Keogh

In 1971 a girl with really cropped short hair turns up in a small Arizona town, showing a grocery store clerk ID in the name of Ethel Grady and saying she’s aiming to kill the man who murdered her family. On the bus ride there she’s been reading a Western paperback, and the exploits of a cowboy named Sol Eaton tracking down his own arch-enemy form a backdrop to the girl’s mission.

Co-writers Lonnie Nadler and Zac Thompson don’t give much away beyond that in the opening chapter. They establish Ethel doesn’t possess much in the way of patience or subtlety, and her method of blundering in is likely to get her hurt, or worse. It’s later revealed that one year on there’s been no progress in the police investigation into her family’s murder, and they’re not keen to have her around. Sol, meanwhile is older, more experienced and less given to blundering.

There’s a disconnect between Ethel and Sol’s narratives, a sense that they’re being forced together, but Undone by Blood really scores with Sami Kivelä’s art. Whether he’s drawing the remoteness of small town Arizona and its 1971 inhabitants or the raw country Sol travels nearly a century earlier, Kivelä puts readers right in the location. He has an eye for the trappings of each era, and when he needs to step away from reality he handles that expressively also. Most importantly, though, he cultivates the necessary sinister atmosphere via people’s expressions and his storytelling.

Flashbacks to the incident prompting Ethel’s obsession with revenge are a clumsy accompaniment to her investigations, but pay off in the end by revealing why Ethel’s cropped her hair. Ultimately, The Shadow of a Wanted Man never bridges the chasm between the two separate stories. Ethel’s is more interesting than Sol’s, which with one exception is just a selection of movie scenes strung together, but even hers is disappointing for switching to reality when so much has been constructed as myth. Each ending, though, has one great moment. In Sol’s case it’s the trap that’s been set and in Ethel’s it’s her guilt. Undone by Blood was successful enough to earn a sequel in The Other Side of Eden, so enough readers brought into the premise.

It’s perhaps nitpicking, but irritating anachronistic errors occur. It would have been easy enough to check that no-one would have been wearing either an Iggy Pop or Lou Reed t-shirt in 1971, as their solo breakthroughs were at least a year away. And there’s no way a school secretary close to retirement would know either of them.