A Bad Place to Die

By Easy Jackson

Pinnacle, November 2018

There aren’t many options for an eighteen-year-old girl in the Old West. Especially an orphan like Tennessee Smith. She can either sell her body in a seedy saloon or take her chances as a mail-order bride. Tennie chooses the latter. Joining a wagonload of women across Indian territory, she arrives in the God-forsaken town of Ring Bit, Texas. Her husband-to-be is surprisingly decent. But after tying the knot in a quick ceremony, he pops even more surprises on her. First, he introduces Tennie to his three young sons. Then he drops dead on their wedding night . . . 

Some women would hightail it out of there. Not Tennie. She’ll do whatever it takes to save the ranch and raise those boys. Rusty is thirteen, Lucas is ten, and Badger is six. They need a mother. Tennie needs a job. And the town needs a marshal. Sure, the local gamblers, outlaws, and thieves have no use for the law. Then again, they never met a lawman, or woman, like Tennessee Smith . . .

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this, the first book in a new series, that has a cover that would look more in place on a romance western than the action-packed westerns I usually read. But the back cover does state; ‘Meet Tennessee Smith: She shoots from the hip.’ So that, along with the above blurb makes this sound like it could be the kind of western I hoped it would be. Easy Jackson is a new name to front a western too, and yes, it’s a pseudonym, the real author being Vicky J. Rose.

The first thing that I’m going to point out is this is not the action-packed western I hoped for, in that it isn’t filled with gunplay and fist-fights. And so much for Tennie shooting from the hip, she doesn’t carry a gun – although she does use one in anger eventually. Having read a couple of romance westerns this book isn’t like them either, and it doesn’t contain scenes of explicit sex or contain loads of bad language.

So what do you get? The answer is a very good read. Not all westerns have to be filled with blood-thirsty action do they? Character studies a very well done and the author veils some of them in mystery. Tennie is a beautiful woman and I found myself amused by how she hardly battered an eyelid as just about every male in the book proposed marriage to her. She is prone to bursting into tears a bit too often for my taste though. The author soon had me swept up in the plot of just why the town council wanted an inexperienced girl to be marshal, and all the other subplots too added a lot of intrigue to the tale so I just had to keep reading to find out how everything panned out. Descriptions and dialogue are very well written too.

An ill-thought out scheme by one man to get rid of his mistress so he can hopefully talk Tennie into marrying him results in murder and the story really picks up here and some of the most memorable scenes take place in the jail as Tennie keeps the killer locked up. When transporting this prisoner to the next town for trial the story becomes much more action packed as gunplay takes centre-stage and does so until tales end.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable story that held my attention well and certainly left me looking forward to the second book, A Season in Hell, which is due to be published in April 2019.