Sunday 26 January 2014

Long Ridin' Man

By Jake Douglas
Hale, January 2014

They call him ‘Hunter’ because he ruthlessly picks off men. But there is one man in particular for whom he searches: the man who destroyed his family. Catching up with the killer finds Hunter in a booming town in urgent need of a deputy sheriff and, in need of cash, he pins on the badge.

But the body count is rising and the folk of Cimarron wonder just who they’ve hired as their peacemaker and when Hunter discovers why the town needs a fast gun so urgently the odds are that it will be too late for him to get out alive….

Dealing with the man who killed his family is the opening scene in what turns out to be an extremely fast moving read full of intrigue and violent action. Jake Douglas lets the reader in on a few of the answers to the puzzles that are troubling Hunter but doesn’t explain all straight away thus ensuring the reader will keep turning the pages.

As well as the reason a man who should want Hunter out of town but seems happy to have him in Cimarron and working as a deputy, there is also the hostility aimed at Hunter by his landlady, a young woman whose brothers he killed some time ago. Can Hunter convince her it was in self-defence? Will he become friends with her? Possibly more? The conclusion of this particular relationship closes the book and, for me, will stick in my mind for a long time.

Jake Douglas is a pseudonym used by Keith Hetherington, a prolific writer of westerns who always produces top-class reads. After having written many hundreds of stories I’m regularly astounded at how he seems to keep coming up with plots that seem fresh and new that leave me eager to read more of his work, as this one does. 

Long Ridin' Man at Amazon.com
Long Ridin' Man (Black Horse Western) at Amazon.co.uk

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