The Other Madden

By Brent Towns

The Crowood Press, March 2019

There is oil on Madden land and Bren Deavers means to have it. But when Joe Madden is killed and sent home wrapped in barbed wire, things heat up. For the Maddens are fighters and Elmira and Emily are going to do just that.

But Joe also had a brother. One nobody talked about. The dangerous one.

They just referred to him as – the other Madden!

Trace Madden, the other Madden, is an outlaw. This makes for some interesting situations when he arrives in town to discover who killed his brother. People fear him. The law doesn’t want him around and neither does Bren Deavers. Worse than that, his mother would rather he left too, but she has a problem there as she likes Trace’s companion, Meredith, who has also ridden the outlaw trail alongside Trace. So, the story contains some complicated relationships that will have to be resolved while justice is sort for the death of Joe Madden.

Brent Towns tells the story in a mixture of first person and third. The switches between the two types of viewpoint are smoothly done and I hardly noticed as I became immersed in the fast-paced story that explodes with violent action without hardly taking a breath between these bouts of gunplay. 

Towns also has a couple of plot twists that came as a welcome surprise, but to say more would spoil the story for anyone intending to read this entertaining book. 

Brent Towns is an Australian author who writes Black Horse Westerns under other pseudonyms too, these being B.S. Dunn and Sam Clancy. I’ve read books under all these names and have yet to be disappointed in any of them.