REMINGTON
number 1 of 7
By James Calder Boone
Avon, June 1987
Judge Samuel Parkhurst Barnstall never makes Remington’s assignments easy. It’s hard enough to track down a trio of cutthroats who plundered a north Texas town, leaving a lawman strung up for the coyotes to finish. But bringing them back for trial – alive? That’ll take some sand.
Especially when their leader is the legendary Ramsey Clagg, 300 pounds of knife-wise buffalo skinner with a sweet tooth for torture. To even the odds, Remington must talk his way into Clagg’s Hell’s Door hideout. A door no lawman has ever seen swing open…and lived.
Judge Barnstall is a terrific character. His no-nonsense approach to law and order and his desire to hang outlaws to make an example of them to other would-be offenders is the reason he instructs Remington to bring back his prey alive. This, of course, leads to all kind of problems for the lawman.
Tracking down and capturing the first two cutthroats is easy enough and it seems like the lawman will be able to fulfil his task without killing anyone. But the leader of the trio of killers has a band of outlaws to back his play and Remington has no choice but to turn his guns on them in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, where the lawman is the hunted.
The story moves swiftly forward and is well-written. The prose made me want to keep turning the pages to see if Remington could possibly bring back all those he was charged to find alive. One of the highlights of the book is when Remington enters Clagg’s Hell and plays the part of an outlaw. I had in my mind that surely there would be someone in the gang who would recognize such a well-known lawman and I wasn’t disappointed with my guess, and from that moment the book really picks up in the action stakes.
James Calder Boone is a pseudonym and this first book in the series was written by Jack Zavada and his storytelling and plotting made this a fine read. So much so that I’m looking forward to reading the next one soon, although it isn’t written by Zavada. In fact Zavada only wrote book one. A couple of much more well-known western authors, Robert Vaughan and Jory Sherman, came on board for the rest of the series.
1 comment:
Often when you write reviews of older books like this, I jump to Amazon to see if they're available as ebooks. Usually they aren't. So much good stuff, out of print.
But I did find one Jack Zavada western, Killers On My Trail. I'm going to give it a shot based on the good things you say about his writing.
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