Petticoat Marshal

By George Snyder

Crowood Press, April 2019

Gunfighter Cort Packet rides into the town of Scarlet intending to kill Yucca Frazel, but many try to prevent him: Frazel’s employer rancher Addison Blackwell, an Indian agent cheating Apaches out of goods, a gunfighter rumoured to have murdered the marshal’s husband, and the marshal herself – Rebecca Rogers, trying to find the truth about her husband’s death, forced into being marshal in a fixed election by the powerful rancher who professes warm feelings for her. But are the feelings for here, or are they for the riches on her land?

Before Cort can finish his business with Yucca Frazel, he finds himself caught up in killings, treachery, stealing and politics that threaten to leave him lying dead.

I’ve not read any of George Snyder’s Black Horse Westerns, under that name or his other pseudonym of George Arthur before, so I approached this one open minded. The book has a hard-hitting start with fairly graphic descriptions of violence and death. Those first few short chapters explain why Cort is intent on killing Yucca Frazel.

Cort Packet is also slightly more unusual to many other western heroes, as Snyder has a cripple as the leading character, having had his leg shattered during the Civil War and now needs the aid of a silver topped cane to get around. 

The story is very fast moving and the author regularly switches from Cort to other characters, and in doing so Snyder makes sure the reader knows what is going on with the storylines even if Cort and Rebecca Rogers don’t. It’s the plot behind the rancher’s desire for Rebecca’s land that fills the bulk of the tale. 

Snyder does keep one sting-in-the-tail for the end, shocking both Cort and the reader with its horror, which leads to a bloody and vicious finale. Even though I had worked that twist out quite early on it in no way diminished my enjoyment of this book and I closed this book feeling thoroughly entertained.