Ron Currie takes a big swing right at the start of his 2025 novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne. The book begins with a prequel spanning 300 years in the life of the Levesque family, Franco-Americans who settle in Waterville, Maine. For generations, the women of the Levesque line encounter brutality, deprivation and struggle, culminating in the hard-bitten Babs Levesque (Dionne is her married name) who takes a courageous but foolhardy stand in 1968 and pays a horrible price for it.
After that, Currie moves the setting to 2016, where Babs Dionne remains in Waterville’s Little Canada, an enclave of fellow Francos, some of whom still speak French as a first language. Babs and her trusted friends and relatives run a kind of criminal empire in Little Canada, using the funds to keep their community going.
Babs runs her business with an iron fist, but her family is in shambles. Her daughters are both in serious trouble. Lori, a Marine, is addicted to pain-killers and seeing ghosts thanks to a mysterious brain injury. But she’s a peach compared with her younger sister Celeste, known to all as “Sis.” Sis is hooked on meth and largely checked out of work and family. Her alcoholic husband Bruce has started hitting their son Jason, perpetuating the violence he suffered at the hand of his own father. Sis is getting more desperate for drugs, and going to extremes to get them after her money runs out. When Sis disappears one night, Babs and Lori are incredibly worried, with Babs in particular willing to burn everything down to find her daughter.
Into this already dangerous situation, Currie lobs the grenade of a deadly assassin employed by a Canadian drug kingpin named Ogopogo, after the sea monster. Ogopogo has noticed declining sales in Babs’ territory, and realizes that she and her friends to blame. Now he wants them to work for him, or else.
Currie’s strengths as a writer are his finely-tuned sense of humor and his ability to craft unique, memorable set pieces. The novel has the pacing of an action movie, with escalating stakes and deadly consequences. He’s a little weaker on character work. Babs, Lori, and many others are revealed almost exclusively through backstories instead of actions. It’s a way for Currie to play even more into his strengths, but it tends to leave the characters a bit thin, defined by one distinctive trait.
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is still a fun time, but the lack of depth makes it feel a little more disposable than it should.
