Spark on the Prairie

Guns and Gavel Series #2

by Johnny D. Boggs

When General Sherman appoints lawyers Thomas Ball and Joe Woolfolk as counsel to Satanta and Big Tree, two Kiowa warriors who have been accused of murdering seven cowboys, Thomas and Joe, ordered to prove them guilty, instead find themselves defending the proud warriors' innocence. Original.

Genres: Westerns

320 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 6, 2003

About the author

Johnny D. Boggs is a Spur- and Wrangler Award-winning author of the American West and frontier. Born in 1962, Boggs grew up on a farm near Timmonsville, South Carolina, around the old stamping grounds of Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion (chronicled in his frontier novel The Despoilers). He knew he wanted to be a writer at an early age. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Lisa Smith; son, Jack Smith Boggs; and basset hound, June.

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fact-based novel is a modern-day treatment of a theme found in early western fiction—the coming of the law to the frontier. Writers from the turn of the last century presented the introduction of courts and lawyers as a mixed blessing. Due process slowed down the wheels of justice. Individuals and vigilance committees, with guns and ropes, lost the authority to enforce the law as they saw fit. Lawyers were regarded with particular disdain.

Today, popular fiction casts them in a somewhat different light. Lawyers are often presented as defenders of the wrongly accused or as advocates of justice for the powerless and oppressed. Thus, in this fine historical novel, they are quite honorable, if not heroic. It’s a story of a pair of court-appointed attorneys who, despite virulent public opinion, do their best to defend two Kiowa chiefs on trial for murder...

Read my review at my blog.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun book to read. Nice descriptions and dialogue of the times.