Shotgun Messenger

By Colin Bainbridge

A Black Horse Western from Hale, June 2011

The outlaw’s first mistake was shooting the dog. That dog belonged to Rhett Coulter and he wasn’t a man to mess with, as Lorne Roberts and his gang of gunslicks would soon discover.

Meanwhile, Coulter’s friend’s ranch, the Block H, is burned down and his woman barely escapes with her life. Now he has another reason to want to put Roberts out of business, quite apart from the little matter of his hoard of stolen bullion.

As Coulter fights against overwhelming odds, events hurtle along like a runaway stagecoach towards the final, blistering showdown….

If it’s a book packed with action you want then you need look no further than Colin Bainbridge’s third Black Horse Western. The story seems to be pretty much one exchange of gunfire, or fists, after another. This is all interspersed with the good guys attempting to second-guess the next moves of the bad guys, including trying to work out their motives. The latter leading to many questions such as are there more than one band of outlaws at work here, and just who is the mysterious Reber – an outlaw leader people have heard about but never seen? So the book contains plenty of mystery within its fast moving plot too.

Colin Bainbridge writes long chapters, this book having only six. Descriptions of landscapes, buildings, and people are sparse and to the point. There isn’t any bad language as far as I remember.

Shotgun Messenger is an entertaining read that is officially released at the end of the month but is available now from the usual Internet bookstores.