Tuesday 31 August 2021

TILL DEATH



HAVE BRIDES, WILL TRAVEL 3
By William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone
Pinnacle, September 2021
First published by Kensington in hardback, April 2021

If anyone can get a shipment of brides to the church on time, it’s Bo Creel and Scratch Morton. But this time, they’ll have to cross hell and high water to escort four marriage-bound beauties to a remote gold mining town in Alaska. The brides-to-be include a dangerously attractive widow, her sweet-hearted niece, and two of their friends. The roadblocks to the altar include a lecherous saloon owner, a lovesick sailor, and a gang of hired guns. And that’s just for starters . . . 

The real trouble begins when they reach the Alaskan boomtown. It’s a hotbed of gold and greed, as wild as any on the Texas frontier. It’s clear to Bo and Scratch that the ladies’ “eligible bachelors” are definitely not as advertised. But – to Bo and Scratch’s surprise – neither are their mail-order brides. Before anyone starts exchanging vows and tossing rice, this gold-hungry wedding party will be swapping lead. And the RSVPs will be RIPs . . . 

Having enjoyed the first two Have Brides, Will Travel books, that saw the return of Bo Creel and Scratch Morton from the Sidewinders series, I was looking forward to reading Till Death. Our two elderly heroes soon find themselves facing superior odds from humans and nature, the latter taking place as their ship battles through a destructive storm. 

Quite a large portion of this tale takes place aboard ships and this makes for a welcome change to riding horses or wagons across inhospitable land. It is during this part that one of the mail-order brides, Caroline, struggles with her feelings for one of the sailors and those for her intended waiting in Alaska.

Bo and Scratch do their best to keep trouble at bay, but it seems everywhere they go they create new enemies, either those wanting to kill Creel and Morton or get to know the girls a whole lot better. Some of these adversaries are prepared to follow them to Alaska, and when various groups of these foes team up it looks like Bo and Scratch will have to take on impossible to beat odds.

Action come thick and fast and the plot writhes with twists. The author often switches from one set of characters to another and, more often than not, leaves them in danger, therefore making this a very difficult to put-down book as the reader will want to know what happens next. The final scenes feature some explosive gunplay that resolves everything in a suitable fashion and I was left hoping there will be a fourth book in the not-too-distant future. 

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