Trailsman #356

GRIZZLY FURY

By Jon Sharpe

Signet, June 2011

The Northern Rockies, 1861 – where fang and claw make a feast of human flesh.

Skye Fargo has faced killers of every shape and size. But when a monstrous grizzly outside Gold Creek starts splitting people’s skulls and feasting on the gray matter, Fargo finds himself pitted against a bloodthirsty beast that has already slaughtered and devoured everyone who tried to hunt it down. And the Trailsman might be next on the menu.

Unlike the majority of Trailsman books, this one sees Skye Fargo pitted against a foe that isn’t human. Yes there are one or two humans to deal with, as there is competition with others eager to claim the bounty for being the person who kills the grizzly known as Brain Eater, but the book is mainly about the hunt for this creature.

Fargo teams up with a great group of people, each being a superb character in their own rights, none of which this reader wanted to see die, yet this being a Trailsman book some, if not all, would surely fall prey to the grizzly wouldn’t they?

Having such a dangerous, and hard to kill, creature stalking its hunters, makes for some tense and breath-holding scenes. This definitely ensures the reader won’t be putting the book down before these gripping sequences are played out.

Descriptions paint vivid images within the mind, be they of the landscape these deadly games of death take place in, or the graphic accounts of the grizzly’s killings.

To balance the more horrific elements of the tale, the author, David Robbins writing as Jon Sharpe, includes some humour, mainly through dialogue, that at times had me laughing out loud.

So, once more, we have a well-told, fast moving, action-packed, Trailsman story in Grizzly Fury, and as I’ve said the theme of this tale makes it that little bit different from other entries in this long running series.