Sunday 6 March 2022

BLOOD ON THE MOON


RUFF JUSTICE
Number 3 of 28
By Warren T. Longtree
Signet, December 1981

With her father dangerously ill, lovely Baroness Sophia Mancek was desperately determined to track down her missing sister. And once she’d decided that Ruffin T. Justice was the only man for the job, Sophia made him the kind of offer no real man could resist. But Ruff soon realized the seductive Sophia had roped him into much more than he bargained for, as he found himself riding a trail that led through treacherous snow-filled passes and straight into a bullet-blazing battle with gunrunners and renegade Indians….

Warren T. Longtree is a pseudonym used by Paul Lederer. I’ve read a lot of books by him and enjoyed them all so was this one as good? The book seems to have a straight-forward plot but it isn’t long before the author throws in some twists and the bodies begin to pile up.

Sophia Mancek’s train carries an interesting variety of people and shortly after the journey begins Justice finds one of them dead in his sleeping compartment. Why has he been killed and who did it? After Justice disposes of the body, he’s surprised that no-one seems to miss the dead man. Justice soon has his suspicions about some of his fellow travellers, and this leads to him being on the wrong end of a savage beating. Pounded to a bloody pulp with broken ribs you have to wonder how he can survive, never mind find Sophia’s missing sister. 

Lederer’s descriptions of land, people and action are very good. He soon had me wondering just who was telling the truth about anything and what their real motives were. It seems as if Justice shouldn’t trust anyone and he soon finds himself driven by his need for vengeance due to the death of a friend. 

Ruff Justice is an adult series so the book contains some explicit sex scenes but these only last for a couple of pages so don’t take up too much of the story and can be easily skipped if you don’t like reading this kind of thing.

There were a couple of scenes that stretched my belief a little, such as what Justice manages to do whilst suffering from broken bones and a battered body, but who wants to let reality get in the way of a good yarn? Because of this Blood on the Moon is probably not the best book I’ve read by Paul Lederer, but it was still an entertaining read and I was left looking forward to seeing what kind of scape Ruff Justice gets into in the next book in the series.

No comments: