Fiction to Read By the Fire
By: William Garwood 11/03/2009
The American West has long inspired novelists with memorable subjects such as crusading lawmen, battles with Nature, anti-heroic badmen and valiant women conquering the harshness of the prairies. All four subjects are brilliantly expressed in these latest novels:
Lauraine Snelling’s A Measure of Mercy (Bethany House, $13.99) is set in the bleak immigrant country of Willa Cather and told with the drive of a Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman tale. Her novel follows 18-year-old Astrid Bjorklund’s dream of becoming a woman doctor in Blessing, North Dakota. But after passing her local internship for a medical school, she loses a young patient. When she thinks of leaving as a medical missionary, a former admirer returns to Blessing and courts her. Will she give up love to follow her dream?
Johnny D. Boggs’s Hard Winter (Five Star, $25.95) has all the impact of that deadly winter of 1886-87 with its murderous cold, hellish gales and impassable drifts. But when the Chinook’s benevolent winds finally slay the Slayer, will the decimated ranchers and homesteaders have enough true grit to remain and rebuild?
Cotton Smith’s Death Mask (Leisure, $6.99) follows a trail of ghostly revenge. After ex-Texas Ranger Tanneman Rose is jailed for bank robbery, he passes a death sentence on Time Carlow, his former friend and captor. After Rose dies in a jail break, the murders of those who helped send him to jail continue. Now Carlow has to find the killer—before he’s next.
Robert D. Parker’s lawmen for hire, Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole, trail the troubled Allie French to the town of Brimstone (G.P. Putnam & Sons, $25.95) in Parker’s Appaloosa trilogy. There she’s been “saved” by the shifty but handsome Brother Percival, and she sings militant hymns in his crime-fighting Church of the Brotherhood. Taking on the law job of keeping the saloon gunmen from the Brotherhood’s bar smashers thrusts Allie into a firestorm of gunplay.
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