The Pawnee were running amok from Kansas down to Oklahoma, and the only thing the U.S. Army was stopping was their arrow heads. That’s why General Eakins turned to Skye Fargo for help. Skye liked Eakins’ hotblooded daughter Annabel far better than her cold-fish father, but still took the job and headed south to a Missouri swept by a firestorm of savage fury. What he found was a woman doing a man’s dangerous job, and a mystery that went beyond Indian uprisings to unspeakable white treachery, as he followed a trail of greed and gore with his country’s future at stake and his life on the line at every false lead, wrong turn, and dead end….
After opening scenes that result in Fargo being troubled by a statement Eakins makes regarding his daughter, the author piles on the problems facing The Trailsman. Why are the Pawnee making half-hearted attacks on the soldiers and how is gold being smuggled to finance the confederate states as the threat of Civil War grows? Whilst trying to solve these mysteries, Fargo finds himself in a number of fights, some of his own making as he attempts to force those he suspects to reveal themselves.
The Trailsman is an adult western series so the book does contain some graphic sex, but after the first explicit scene these acts are dealt with quickly so they don’t interrupt the story's main plot too much.
The book is easy to read and the pacing is superb, never letting up in the action department, each chapter have at least one round of gunplay or fist-fights. Going by the length of the chapters, I’d hazard a guess at this being written by series originator Jon Messmann, but I wouldn’t like to say for sure. One thing I did notice, and that is that Fargo doesn’t carry an Arkansas Toothpick in this book, instead he has a throwing knife concealed in his boot. Perhaps the toothpick was introduced later in the series?
The plot isn’t particularly complicated and offered little in the way of surprises and how the gold was being smuggled was easy to work out. Having said that these points didn’t lessen my enjoyment of this book and I’d recommend it to all fans of the Trailsman series.
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