Friday 27 July 2012

Tanglefoot

By Logan Winters
Hale, July 2012

It was a long way from Kansas to Las Palmas, New Mexico Territory, but Chad Dempster had trouble brewing at home and was hoping the trip would be worth it. He wanted a new town, new ways, and a new name. On emerging from the Overland Stage, he got all three at once, but not in the way he could have expected. He stumbled out, hit the ground and became the immediate butt of the local wits who dubbed him ‘Tanglefoot’.

Fortunately, or so he thought, Glen Walker, one of the town’s first citizens came to his aid, dusted him off and offered him work. What Chad could not have known was that Walker had chosen him as the ideal dupe to help him loot the town of Los Palmas, using a badge and a gun.

Logan Winters once more comes up with the goods in this fast paced book that has greed as its central theme. Greed made legal by hastily re-written laws that it seems cannot be opposed or changed. So even though Chad and his new friend deputy Byron Starr, who has a dubious past of his own that could be his undoing, it seems that this is one new law that they can’t beat.

The how Chad and Starr save the town from Walker’s law provides fascinating and gripping reading. Walker also has numerous gunmen on his payroll so the story has plenty of gun action too, as Walker decides he needs to dispose of Chad. There’s a humorous element in that Chad is a little clumsy and not very good with a gun, yet through circumstance he is seen to be the opposite.

At the close of this story I was again left with the feeling of being extremely well entertained and looking forward to the next Logan Winters’s book, but, like other times, I don’t have to wait as Logan Winters is a pseudonym used by Paul Lederer and he also writes as Owen G. Irons and it just so happens that Hale have published one of these books this month too: The Rose Canyon Gang.

Both books have an official release date of July 31st but are available now from all the usual Internet bookstores.

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