This quickest and most accurate review that I can give of The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is this: The book reads like a strong season of the Fargo TV series on FX. If you like Fargo, you’ll like this book. If you don’t, you won’t. 
What’s like Fargo in the book? First, the tone. The reader will enjoy a counterintuitively pleasing gumbo of tension, laugh-out-loud humor, sharp truth telling, sadness, and mystery.
Second, the compelling characters. Ron Currie’s titular Babs Dionne is the perfect matriarch of a Fargo season. She’s a tough-as-nails leader and gang boss. She does things outside the law to keep order when the local government can’t or won’t. She does things that way because she learned from a young age that if she doesn’t protect her minority Franco-American Maine community, no one will. Drugs and justice come through her. A character describes her this way:
“You think her power comes from pushing people around. But that’s not it. Her power in in here.” [She] tapped her fingers against her own chest. “She loves everything – her grandson, her daughters, us, this neighborhood – harder than you even know is possible. If you loved like Babs does, it would break you.”
However, the fierce Babs is aging and ripe for challenge. The world is moving on, and maybe beyond her control. Maybe that’s a good thing. But maybe not. The challenge may come externally, in the form of The Man. A smooth operator in his own right, The Man is a fixer for a powerful out-of-towner. He’s coming in to tell Babs how things are, now. Pretty much every season of Fargo has one of these characters. Besides The Man and his employer, Babs’ challenge may also come internally, from daughters either unwilling or unable to continue doing things Babs’ way.
Despite her good intentions, maybe the scales have found Babs wanting. Maybe she miscalculated and led her community the wrong way. But maybe she didn’t.
4.25/5, rounded down.
