Hawk

By Bret Sanders

Award Books, 1973

A man of steel, a brutal man who knew how to kill without pity. He came out of prison, escaping the hangman’s noose in return for helping the law get a renegade killer. Hate welded him into a savage hunter who always got his prey.

This hunt led him on the trail of a man he’d sworn to kill for years – the sadist who’d once branded him with a hot iron, then tortured and killed the woman he loved.

No lawman’s badge could keep him from the revenge he sought – or the bloody carnage that followed in his wake!

This is the first in a series that lasted for four books. The author behind the pseudonym of Bret Sanders being Dudley Dean McGaughy I believe.

Web Steele aka Hawk is freed from jail to find and free a young newly-wed bride from kidnapper Keegan who is demanding $500,000 for her return. It just so happens that a man Hawk wants to kill, Colonel Spate has teamed up with Keegan in this ransom plot, so Hawk has two reasons to track the outlaws.

The book is fast moving and contains a lot of graphic violence, including rape and torture. Hawk himself takes some punishment, a whipping at the beginning for instance which doesn’t slow him down at all, even though the author describes chunks of Hawk’s flesh being ripped away and splattered across his cell. Not sure I believe Hawk could just shrug this off and carry on as normal but there have been many heroes before and after Hawk that keep going as if nothing has happened to them after being brutally wounded so why should he too?

Hawk and Colonel Spate’s back-story is told in a series of flashbacks, explaining why both have sworn to kill each other on sight and just what Spate branded on Hawk.

The author comes up with some vicious ways to kill man and woman and there’s a neat twist for Hawk to overcome when he finally battles his way through to the kidnapped girl, Amalie, and the passages dealing with her trauma at witnessing so much savage death are very well written.

Like many series the author leaves a storyline hanging to ensure you’ll read the next book and I for one will be doing so soon even though there were a couple of scenes that stretched my belief a little but not enough to stop me enjoying what is essentially a non-stop action tale containing a lot of blood-letting. Takes me back to when I first started reading westerns, those violent UK series from the group of writers known as the Piccadilly Cowboys in particular.