I was going to do a fuller review of Relentless but Cullen Gallagher already covered some of what I was going to write. Check out his review.
Some quick thoughts.
I feel like the works of Brian Garfield, who is very much still alive, isn't talked about as much these days as they should be. Garfield wrote popular novels, with popular characters. He wrote in multiple genres, he won major awards in those genres. Multiple movies were made from his books. If you have never tried a Brian Garfield novel, fix that. If you like his stuff, say so.
Relentless is an old-school thriller, with a grounded main character, Sam Watchman, who has the kind of competency that you don't see as much in thrillers these days where everyone is a borderline superhero. This is a thriller with its feet on the ground, which makes it more thrilling. One aspect of that groundedness is the little nods to accuracy, in this book you'll find no fantastical briefcase stuffed with millions of dollars.
"Too cramped in here to count it but Baraclough had a good eye and had estimated it at a minimum of nine hundred thousand dollars. About ten cubic feet of tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds. Walker had hefted the four duffel bags when they'd put them aboard and the things weighed maybe sixty pounds each."
Relentless is also considered a neo-western. Neo-westerns are books set in modern times that utilize western tropes and imagery.
Highly recommended
Relentless was filmed as a TV movie in 1977 starring the great Will Sampson. It is out of print but available on Youtube. I won't tell you it's a great movie but it is worth checking out, even out of curiosity. I would love to see a remade filmed version.
Random quotes:
1) "She was a remarkable woman, full of endurance and spirit, but women who chose to live isolated lives on the fringes of the wild country tended to be strong characters. At one point Vickers had told her how anxious her husband was about her and Mrs. Lansford had given him a twisted look and said, How intrepid of him," and looked around as if to emphasize the fact that Ben Lansford wasn't here, hadn't come after her It was evident, and therefore sad, that Mrs. Lansford despised her husband; Watchman found himself regretting that be cause it violated his sense of orderly romantic neatness: a woman is in peril, you rescue her from it, you prepare to return her to her man, and you want her to look forward to that reunion with ecstatic joy. For a moment he resented Mrs Lansford, he made her out to be an ingrate for obscure reasons, he even felt that her attitude somehow threatened everything good between himself and Lisa.
It was a brief passing irrationality and he had no time to dwell on it."
2) "Jasper isn't any less dead today than he was yesterday Watchman said, but then he had to think about that. He hadn't been raised to believe in eye-for-an-eye retribution; that was a white man's concept. Indian law didn't lean hard on revenge and punishment; it emphasized compensation of the victim instead. But you couldn't compensate Jasper Simalie The question had run through his mind at odd intervals in the past two days and although he had never developed much of an introspective habit he was beginning to realize what was behind this dedication of his that had come out of nowhere and taken him by surprise and stripped away a good many superficial layers of easygoing indifference. When you came right down to it, it didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense: they had killed a Navajo, therefore they needed to be caught by a Navajo. It was a streak of what? nationalism? tribalism? he had never thought he had in him. And there was another idea, too, hard to articulate: somehow he needed to demonstrate that they couldn't be allowed to kill a Navajo brother and get away with it."
