Death Rider

as by Boyd Cassidy

A Black Horse Western from Hale, August 2010

When mountain man Rufas Kane stumbles across the body of a harmless cowboy on a hillside overlooking the spirited town of Death, the question everybody is asking themselves is: why would anyone want to kill Dan Cooper?

When one of Gene Adams’ cowboys is killed in a gunfight with the ruthless Trey Skinner, it becomes apparent that Skinner is the man responsible for Cooper’s untimely death. But all is not as it seems.

As the night goes on, an alarming spate of killings shake the town to its foundations, but Gene Adams vows to find the answer and the killer before dawn or die in the attempt.

Boyd Cassidy sure got me hooked very quickly with the question of why are these killings taking place, surely it can’t be as simple as a serial killer just fulfilling his need to kill? Boyd Cassidy also ensures you keep reading by using many cliff-hanger chapter and scene endings, making the book difficult to put down before reaching the last page.

The story moves forwards at a very fast pace as everying takes place during a single night. The death toll is impressive as the killer guns down his seemingly random victims. Adams, his cowboys, and the local law, struggle to work out why these people are being killed and how to catch a killer who disappears like a ghost, and at times seems to be in more than one place at a time. Trey Skinner makes for a terrific bad guy as he runs rings around everyone in the strangely named town of Death.

I’ve not read any other books by Boyd Cassidy, but have read others by the author who writes behind this pseudonym: Michael D. George. One thing I did notice, which is extremely rare for a Black Horse Western, was the lack of women in the story. In fact there’s only a couple mentioned fleetingly, although one of them does get a couple of lines to speak. This has made me interested in finding out if women appear, or not, in the previous nine books by Boyd Cassidy.

Overall, I found Death Rider to be an entertaining read that will see me trying another of this authors books sometime down the trail.

Death Rider is officially released at the end of August but is available now from the usual Internet booksellers.