On Dead Man's Range

Stringer #2

by Lou Cameron

When Sheriff Owens loses the election for the first time in seventeen years, Stuart MacKail, a reporter for the San Francisco Sun, decides to investigate

Genres: Westerns

187 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1987

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of the series on Scribd, so I'm reviewing it. There are ebook copies on Amazon, but they're pretty overpriced, in my book. You cannot charge over five bucks for cover art that shabby.

Anyway, this is a pretty interesting take on the usual Western. Stringer isn't a gunslinger, but a journalist, so he's investigating the usual badman shenanigans to sell copy, not just out of the goodness of his heart. It's also set in the 'New Old West' of the post-1800s, with Model-Ts and such around.

Cameron writes convincingly of the desert setting and historical detail. There's a sparing amount of violence and sex about on par with Ian Fleming's old Bond novels. It's not really one of those murder mysteries where you can solve it yourself, because Cameron has Stringer check out evidence off-screen, so to speak, but it's all compelling enough and seems to hold together well enough.

The last mystery I read was basically a matter of you know the whole gist of it, it's just who specifically is doing it, and I think this is more fun because Cameron really keeps you in suspense about just what the hell is going on. It amounts to a land grab, yeah, but it's a very novel way to go about it, so yeah, four stars, well-earned.

[Richard Mann · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little more slowly paced than most of the series. Most of the series build the books around some historical event (the creation of the Salton Sea, Pancho Villa, Tom Horn, etc.) but this one doesn't. It's just a standard western. Nevertheless, Lou Cameron's writing is always fun to read.