Jim Stegner is a painter with a real market, two dead marriages, a daughter who was murdered, and a prison term for shooting a man in a bar. He’s living in Colorado trying to fish and paint and stay level. Then he comes across a man beating a horse half to death on a back road, and he does something about it, and the man’s family comes for him. The rest is a chase through Colorado and New Mexico with Stegner painting the whole way — Heller writes the act of making a picture better than almost anyone, which is what lifts this above the thriller it otherwise is.
The Painter