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The Long-Range Plan, Wade Tabor
Hazard Press
Reviewed by Sheila Forbes (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

What do you do if you aspire to the good life but have a marked aversion to work? Perhaps, like Cole Archer, you develop an audacious plan that requires perfect timing and nerves of steel to carry out.

When Archer's fiancée throws him over for sleeping around, he consoles himself by spending his days in drunken binges and torrid sexual encounters of every conceivable kind (not to mention a few of the inconceivable variety as well!). The only constant in his life and perhaps his only redeeming feature is his devotion to his cat, Brasco.

The time comes, however, when he needs to make a living and until he can fulfil his ambition to write he takes a job as an English teacher in a Charleston High School. In one of his classes he comes across 16-year-old Savannah. She impresses him with her hard work and determination to succeed in order to escape her squalid life in a trailer camp with a dissolute mother and four young brothers. His desire to encourage and protect her gradually grows into something more than is acceptable between teacher and pupil, and she returns his feelings. As his obsession with her grows, so does his resolve to make a better life for them both.

A chance encounter with a wealthy older woman and her affluent friends gives him a glimpse of the lifestyle he dreams of and which would enable him and Savannah to leave behind their humdrum existence forever. Discovering the dark secrets of the school principal gives Archer the opportunity to carry out his plans, but he must rely on others to carry out some of the financial details. Suddenly, frighteningly, events are out of his control, and he finds that even Savannah has her own agenda.

The story begins slowly but the build-up of tension is steady and relentless; Tabor's descriptions are detailed, graphic, and sometimes nauseating. From early on, in a series of intermezzi we learn that Archer is on the run, a suspect in criminal cases that were no part of his original plan. As we follow his moves towards the Mexican border accompanied only by Brasco, the whole gripping course of events unfolds.
A riveting tale.