THE VULTURE

 

THE BADGE
Book 17 of 24
THE VULTURE
By Bill Reno
Cover art by Shannon Stirnweis
Bantam Books, June 1990

To a violent land, a frontier yet untamed, came a man who wore a badge of law and order. He faced the myriad dangers and paid the price in blood to become one of the most enduring heroic figures of the Old West.

Victorio “the Vulture” Condor is the vicious bandito who has stained the Pecos red with blood. Yet no one has felt the full force of his brutality…until now. As vultures circle hungrily over the bodies of his dead brothers, Victorio declares war on the Texas Rangers – and on Lieutenant Mark Gray, the man who strung them up. One by one, the Rangers will fall before his guns: but not the shrewd Lieutenant. For Gray is a hard man to kill, and as hunter turns to hunted, Victorio will find he’s an even harder man to escape.

The Badge books are about different lawmen, although a few do appear in more than one entry in the series. All the books can be read as stand-alone novels so there is no need to read them in order. 

Even though Lieutenant Mark Gray is the hero of this story the author spends as much time, if not more, telling the reader what Victorio is doing, painting a savage picture of this man and his gang. It seems that Gray and the Texas Rangers are no match for this bandit as the body count grows.

I would hazard a guess that the author, Lew A. Lacy writing as Bill Reno, had some fun coming up with all the different ways Victorio deals out death. The Vulture doesn’t want his targets to die quickly, he wants them to suffer for killing his brothers. Victorio takes great pleasure in sending the Ranger Captain Terrell Sears the badges of his dead men along with a black vulture feather. It’s not just Rangers who are marked to die, there’s a judge and a couple of lawmen too. 

The book doesn’t have a complicated plot, it is a straight-forward tale of revenge that is fairly brutal at times. From reading other books in this series, I couldn’t begin to guess how it would end as the author will kill off the main characters to add lasting impact to his tales. Would that happen in this one? It certainly seemed to be heading down that trail. 

I did feel the final confrontation was drawn out a bit too long, but the final scenes will definitely stay in my mind for a long time and provided a fitting end to this excellent story. For me, The Vulture is one of the best entries I’ve read in this series and I’m looking forward to reading book 18 soon.