Trooper Dalton

By Ed Law

Hale, October 2012

After getting involved in a saloon-room brawl in Fort Lord, Dalton is arrested. His situation worsens when an unsympathetic judge sentences him to a year in jail unless he takes the alternative of signing up with the Plains Cavalry.

Dalton reckons that anything will be better than breaking rocks, but when he joins Company H – known as Company Hell – he soon regrets his decision. The troopers are a motley collection of prisoners recruited from jailhouses, or gunslingers running from arrest warrants.

As his fellow troopers are more determined to destroy the peace than to keep it, Dalton will need all his survival skills to serve out his term and all his ingenuity to defeat their plans.

This is the eighth book in Ed Law’s Dalton series and it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read any of the previous books to get full enjoyment from this one. Any of Dalton’s past that is relevant to this story is included.

Ed Law doesn’t believe in giving his hero an easy time, and in this story Dalton will find himself facing death a number of times. Law writes some extremely tense situations that make for gripping reading, such as when Law finds himself facing a firing squad with no hope of escape.

Dalton also becomes involved with some colourful characters, such as a priest with an unusual self-given task, a burden of labour that will play an important part in the outcome of this story.

There’s plenty of action and ‘how will he get out of that’ predicaments that make this a difficult to put down read. On the strength of this book I reckon it’s time I checked out more of Dalton’s earlier adventures