If you’ve come to think of Kalteis as a writer of modern-day Canadian-flavored gritty noir, this novel may be a jarring departure from what you are expecting. Like his House of Blazes, Kalteis sets Call of Thunder in a historical setting, this time the Kansas dust bowl 🍲 of the Great Depression. It takes you back to the time where country folk on hard times cheered on Bonnie and Clyde. The descriptions take the reader into that stark time with the dry wind blowing across the prairie and family farms decaying and barely staving off the bank’s repo men.

It was a struggle to stay even if your family had been there for three generations. Sonny was a poor dirt farmer in hock way beyond his eyeballs to the bank with debts no honest man could pay 💰. With his marriage to Clara frayed at the edges and barely holding on, he agrees to a last desperate plan to save the farm. And, robbing the bank 🏦 just might be the least of his worrries as he sees fit to go to war against the Klansmen of the Plains.

This is a work which very much brings the thirties back to life from the old cars to the circus 🎪 performers to the sense that no one was gonna help to the dusters raging all through the dry plains.