THE LONESOME DEATH OF JOE SAVAGE
By C.J. Sommers
Cover Art by Prieto Muriana
Robert Hale, November 2012
A sense of family duty led Tracy Keyes to search for his cousin, the notorious Wyoming bad man, Joe Savage. His mother wished to know if he was dead or alive – and so did half the lawmen and bounty hunters in the North County.
Tracy hadn’t seen Savage since they were boys and wasn’t sure he’d even recognize his criminal cousin if they met face to face. Carrying the onus of being related to the infamous Savage made things no easier for him, nor did the bounty hunters who dogged his trail, believing that Tracy could lead them to the outlaw. By the end of the long journey, Tracy was convinced that he was only following Joe Savage into his own grave….
C.J. Sommers doesn’t believe in giving his hero an easy time of it. Tracy will be on the wrong end of fists and have plenty of lead slung at him. He soon realizes he can’t trust anyone, and nearly everyone he meets tells him Savage is dead, and good riddance. If he is dead, then where is his grave? This question, and plenty of others such as who owns the land that Savage had bought now that he is dead add some strong mystery elements to this fast-moving tale. It's difficult to say anything else about the plot without including spoilers.
There’s not as much action in this book as others I have read by this author, but it really doesn’t need it as it’s Tracy’s attempts to unravel the mysteries he’s presented with that easily kept my attention, so much so that I hadn’t realized there hadn’t been as much gunplay as I might have expected until I thought about it.
I’ve read quite a few Black Horse Westerns written by C.J. Sommers and have found them all to be gripping reads and The Lonesome Death of Joe Savage also falls into that category. C.J. Sommers is just one of three pseudonyms Paul Lederer used for his BHWs; the other two pen-names being Logan Winters and Owen G. Irons and I’ve read many of his stories under those names too and I have yet to be disappointed by any of his books. Lederer didn’t just write westerns for Robert Hale Ltd., he also wrote for some of the American publishers too under a variety of names.
