Reunion in Hell

A Ralph Compton novel by Carlton Stowers

Cover art by Dennis Lyall

Berkley, April 2020

Brothers Clay and Cal Breckenridge, sons of a hardscrabble East Texas farmer, never did see eye to eye. Clay, the eldest, returned home after the Civil War to help his father run the family farm; Cal deserted his military post and disappeared into a new life with a new name. Everyone knew who was the good son and who was the bad.

Clay had almost forgotten his wayward brother until the morning a limping horse approached the farm with young Cal Breckenridge’s body slumped in the saddle, shot in the back.

Vowing to avenge Cal’s death, Clay sets off on a perilous journey across the West to find the man responsible and bring him to justice – and take down an outlaw enterprise in the process.

It was back in March 2016 when Signet stopped publishing Ralph Compton westerns and now Berkley has decided to re-launch the line. Starting in April 2020 they are putting out two brand new books each month, and like before, they are printing the real authors name on the cover of the books. Carlton Stowers had just started writing for the Compton line when publication of them came to a halt. In fact, one of Stowers two earlier books, Phantom Hill, was the last one to be published. This is my first time reading anything by him.

When this book was first announced it was called The Breckenridge Boys but as you can see it had a title change to Reunion in Hell, a much harder hitting sounding title. The flames, the pursued riders, that title, all give promise of a violent action western, so did it live up to my expectations? Not really, at least not the brutal action-packed content I’d hoped for. Having said that, the story did pull me in and I enjoyed reading it.

The book is split into four parts a prologue and an epilogue – the prologue explains Cal Breckenridge’s reasons for deserting the army in the last days of the Civil War. The first part covers Clay’s reactions to the death of his brother and his hunt for whoever killed him. Part two is a flashback that tells of what happened to Cal and the other two parts deal with Clay’s revenge and what comes after.

The story is filled with great characters and deals with how they all deal with the events triggered by Cal’s death. Relationships are formed whilst others break under strain. When stolen money goes missing the outlaw leader is driven by a destructive need to recover it and no-one is safe from his wrath. Throw some Comanche into the mix and you have a recipe for a lot of action. And there is plenty of that, particularly in the third part of the book. I’d have liked the action scenes to have been a little longer as they were often over in a flash, but that is just my taste.

The epilogue explains what happens to most of the main characters after the main plot is resolved and is a neat and fitting way to end this very readable story. 

As you’ll have noticed, the book cover carries a tag saying this is part of the Gunfighter series, which may confuse long time fans of Ralph Compton books if they’re expecting this to be a continuation of the older Compton books that carried this series title which were about Nathan Stone and then his son Wes Stone as it has nothing to do with them, and neither do any of the coming books that are also being published as part of the Gunfighter series. As far as I can tell they are all going to be stand-alone titles.

Amazon UK still have the paperback version listed under the title The Breckenridge Boys but the ebook is listed as Reunion in Hell.