Texas Reads>> archiveGlenn Dromgoole

1.29.2017   Author Jeff Guinn pens another western

The third novel in Fort Worth author Jeff Guinn’s award-winning western trilogy is Silver City (Putnam, $27 hardcover), and it’s another thriller that will keep you turning the pages to find out what happens to main character Cash McLendon.

For two years McLendon has been hoping to win back the lover he unceremoniously jilted in St. Louis and make a new life together in California. After their breakup, Gabrielle Tirrito moved to Arizona Territory with her aging father. McLendon pursued them to the town of Glorious but had to make a hasty exit when the man known as Killer Boots hunted him down.

McLendon’s problem is that he married his wealthy boss’s crazy daughter in St. Louis, choosing money over love. When she committed suicide, McLendon headed west. His ex-boss blamed her death on McLendon and sent Killer Boots to bring him back for a private and brutal execution.

After McLendon escaped from Glorious, he ended up in Kansas with a band of buffalo hunters and eventually found himself fighting for his life in the middle of a fierce Indian attack at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, in the Texas Panhandle. Surviving that, and receiving an encouraging letter from Gabrielle, McLendon again heads to Arizona, this time to the prosperous mining town of Mountain View, where Gabrielle and her father are living.

But the vengeful ex-boss learns of McLendon’s new location and once again sends Killer Boots, or Patrick Bautigan, to capture McLendon and bring him back so the boss can get the satisfaction of personally watching him die a painful death. Meanwhile, Cash is trying his best to convince Gabrielle that he is a changed man and that his love for her is genuine. Just as it looks like they might be able to put the past behind them and move forward, Killer Boots shows up.

And then the leisurely pace of the story turns into a hair-raising life-and-death thriller.

Readers new to the series need not have read the first two books in the trilogy — Glorious and Buffalo Trail—to pick up the story in as it unfolds in this third volume. The author briefly recaps the events in McLendon’s life that have led him to Mountain View.

But the first two books are now available in paperback, so if you’re interested in reading the entire trilogy (which I highly recommend), you should start with Glorious, then read Buffalo Trail, then Silver City—or wait for it to come out in paperback, probably in about a year.

Again, though, it’s not mandatory to have read the first two tales to pick up on the action in this new hardback. So feel free to plunge in. You will be in for a treat. Guinn, the former book editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the author of about twenty books, really knows how to keep a reader zoned in.

Guinn writes fiction and nonfiction on widely diverse topics ranging from Santa Claus to Bonnie and Clyde to Charles Manson. His next book, due out in April, delves into the tragic story of preacher Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre.

Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.