COLONEL DEATH

 

CANYON O’GRADY
Book 14 of 25
COLONEL DEATH
By Jon Sharpe
Cover art by Jerome Podwil
Signet Books, July 1991

Canyon O’Grady had his gun hands full of trouble. U.S. Cavalry Colonel Judson Kilgore had led renegade troops out of Texas and down south of the border. O’Grady was sent as a one-man army to stop the kill-crazy colonel and his crew from carving out an empire of evil. Even worse, the big redheaded U.S. special agent also had a bevy of bloodthirsty banditos, a lost confederate colony, and an explosive spitfire to deal with. All O’Grady could do was give it his best shot – again and again and again…

Set in 1868, this story sees O’Grady having to face near unsurmountable odds. A lot of the book sees the author telling us of the atrocities Colonel Kilgore, soon to be known as Colonel Death, was carrying out and tells of men flocking to join his ever-growing army. How can one man, O’Grady, take on over one hundred men? 

As O’Grady travels into Mexico, he finds himself following a trail of corpses and ransacked towns. The locals are weary of Americans and O’Grady has to defend himself from those who assume he’s one of Kilgore’s men. 

Eventually O’Grady meets Mercedes, a young woman who has seen her father and brothers die at the hand of Kilgore. She wants revenge and insists she will accompany O’Grady on his mission. O’Grady doesn’t want her along, but circumstances see her join him. Of course, she’s very attractive and O’Grady enjoys some explicit action with her. 

The final showdown is fast-paced and takes place over a few skirmishes and the defence of and an attack on a fortified town. 

Jon Sharpe is a pseudonym. Book twelve saw Chet Cunningham stop writing for the series (he’d written all but three of the previous books up to then). Book thirteen saw a new author come on board and I believe this book, number fourteen, is yet another new writer. I’m not sure who it is but I have seen it mentioned that it was Mark K. Roberts. I’m not familiar enough with his writing to confirm whether this is true or not. 

Colonel Death is a longer story than the previous book. Not in page length but in the size of the print and that the chapters start a few lines down from the end of the previous one rather than on the next page. To be honest I did feel the story rambled a bit at times, especially during the first half or so, but it still held my attention as I wanted to find out how O’Grady would succeed in his mission. The story is very straight-forward with little in the way of twists. Overall, I found this book to be an ok read.

ARIZONA HELLCAT

HEAD HUNTER

Book 1 of 13

ARIZONA HELLCAT

By E. J. Hunter

Cover art by Diane Sivavec

Zebra Books, June 1987

A seventeen-year-old girl with green eyes and auburn hair is hardly the kind of law a gunslinger with a price on his head expects to find on his trail. But Charity Rose can ride anything on four legs and shoot as straight as any man. When her father is gunned down by Concho Bill Baudine’s gang – and then the sidewinders take turns with her – Charity vows to take her revenge with gunpowder and hot lead!

There wasn’t a woman born yet who could tough it out with hardcase outlaws, but Charity vowed she’d be the first. All it took was polishing her skills with her double-action handgun and using every trick she knew to get the revenge she wanted. She was a rat catcher and she’d ride hard to blast the deadly vermin that were loose in the territory.

I read a couple of the later books in this series years and years ago and I can’t really remember much about them, so any spoilers they may contain have been long forgotten by me. What I do remember is that there are some story threads that continue throughout the series, so I thought it would be fun to find out how it all began.

Arizona Hellcat is also twice the length of the rest of the books in the series. If I’m honest I reckon it could easily have had a lot of the content cut so it matched the size of the other books without losing anything important to the plot. For instance, Charity’s boyfriend, Tom, tries on numerous occasions to talk her out of going after the outlaws and this becomes very repetitive, especially as later in the book she returns to her home town and Tom tries again using the same arguments. 

The story begins with Charity tracking down and killing one of the men she seeks. We then flashback to the time of her father’s killing and her rape. Seeing how her ordeal affects her made for some compelling reading as does her attempts to better herself in the art of using guns. Later in the book we watch Charity learning to use her feet and hands as weapons in a lengthy scene, yet she never uses this form of fighting in this story, so that is another part of the book that could have been dropped. 

Even though the majority of the story is predictable and at times unbelievable, such as how many men think she’s a he due to how Charity dresses on the trail, two even make this mistake when viewing her naked from behind, I still found parts of it enjoyable, especially that Charity doesn’t always get her man. I also liked how Charity has a large dog that travels with her and obeys her commands to terrorize or kill people if need be.

I must also point out that the Head Hunter books are classed as adult westerns so there is a fair amount of explicit sex within the pages, not as much as I was expecting, but enough to put people off who don’t like that kind of thing in their reading material. 

Did I find enough to like in this story to want to read the next book? I’ll probably give it a go sometime especially as it is shorter so won’t be filled with as much padding as I feel this one was but it won’t be anytime soon.

E. J. Hunter is a pseudonym for Mark K. Roberts.