The most wanted man in the West, Big Bob McGraw has earned his reputation as a thief and killer. With a gang of trigger-happy desperadoes willing to do his bidding, McGraw has robbed banks, stagecoaches, and railroads, raised hell ravaging towns, and left bodies littering the streets in his wake.
Carson Stone rode with McGraw’s gang exactly once, minding their horses during a bank robbery, before quitting. But with the marshal of El Paso, Texas, gunned down in cold blood as the bandits escaped, he’d been judged guilty by association. To clear his name, Carson teams up with bounty hunter Colby Tate to track down the outlaws – now scattered across the frontier – and bring them to justice. And Carson must convince his partner to bring McGraw in alive or he’ll never escape the shadow of the hangman’s noose.
Packed with a great set of characters, this book pulled me in from the opening scenes. Stone’s task seems almost impossible even when he teams up with a couple of bounty hunters as McGraw’s whereabouts is unknown. Will he be able to persuade the bounty hunters to bring McGraw in alive? These questions, and more, kept me turning the pages.
Nate Morgan, a pseudonym for Victor Gischler, includes plenty of gunplay that is fairly graphic in its description. He doesn’t give Stone an easy ride either as he will soon have to face the reality of double-cross – this twist adding a neat unforeseen surprise element to the story as long as you haven’t read the first published Carson Stone book, Dead Man’s Trail.
Dead Man’s Trail was published in December 2022. I read and reviewed it here. I wondered then if Pinnacle had made a mistake in the order they put these two books out, and I’m convinced of it now. This is such a shame as Dead Man’s Trail has a lot of references to the storyline of A Short Rope for a Tall Man and reading them as published really spoilt the twists in A Short Rope for a Tall Man. If you have both these books but have yet to read them, may I suggest you read them in the wrong order to get the most enjoyment out of them, or just think of it as a prequel.
Having read them both, I can only hope that we haven’t heard the last of Carson Stone.
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