Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆
A. W. Hart, the nominal “author” of the Avenging Angels series of western adventures featuring a twin brother-sister pair of bounty hunters in the post-Civil War West, is actually a house pen name; the books are all really written by different authors. (The writer here, Paul Ebbs, though working in a quintessentially American genre, is an Englishman, but a long-standing Western fan.) Barb and I were introduced to the series because the author of one of the books, Charles Gramlich, is one of my Goodreads friends. Before starting on this one, together we’d read and liked three of the books. But, because it’s a long, episodic series (in which the books after the first one don’t have to be read in order), and I was impatient to see whether one romantic connection and another possible one set up in the first book would really come to fruition, I suggested that we make this concluding volume our next read, and she agreed. (To avoid a spoiler, I won’t say whether or not my hopes on that score were fulfilled.)
No exact dates are given here; but since the first book began in 1865 (the next book would have to have been set in 1866) and judging from the number of intervening adventures, I’d guess the main storyline here to be set no earlier than 1870, making co-protagonists George Washington (“Reno”) and Sara Bass in their early 20s at least. But the book opens with three short Prologue vignettes, the first dated “twelve months ago,” from the viewpoint of an unnamed female pushed off of a bridge to a 40-foot drop into a raging river, followed by two more dated, respectively, three and two “months ago.” None of these give us much information; but we are told that she survived, that her brother Robert Stirling-Hamer was a wealthy Arizona copper-mining magnate who has been murdered, and that his accused killer “Don” was in turn killed by bounty hunters (guess who?), but that Don’s brother in New York has now gotten an anonymous letter claiming that his brother was innocent.
Our main story opens with the Bass twins in a tight situation in West Texas, in danger from a psychotic fugitive who’s already murdered his own parents and set fire to a schoolhouse full of kids. But they’re soon to learn that there are now wanted posters out for them, claiming that their killing of Donald Callan eight months previously was an unauthorized murder. From there, the present narrative is periodically interspersed with flashbacks to “eight months ago,” doling out strategic memories of the earlier events (which will finally come together with the present), and at times some short scenes from an omniscient third-person narrator describing present goings-on in Robert’s town of Dry Mouth; but none of these fully explain what actually happened with Robert’s murder. and may at times deepen the mystery.
Ebbs writes very well, with a gift for apt and fresh (but not overdone) similes and vivid turns of phrase. He also brings the varied Southwestern landscape to well-realized life. The publisher and writers have always tried to make this series Christian-friendly; but where it’s clear that some of the authors had only vague knowledge of Christian beliefs, Ebbs actually does explicitly refer to Christ’s sacrificial death for sin in one place. A unique feature here (at least, compared to the other three installments we read) is that all of the chapter titles have biblical or hymnic cadences, and epigraphs that I’m guessing come from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Although the book is very violent (as usual for this series), bad language is scanty and not very rough, and there’s no graphic sexual content and little reference to sex at all. (A Catholic priest is a sympathetic character, Reno’s search for God’s guidance here is a realistically-treated and important theme, and the Bible he inherited from his dad plays a big role.) Reno and Sara’s character portrayals are in keeping with the earlier series books we’ve read (except that Sara’s ruthless streak, at one point, cranks up a notch that even startles Reno).
There are a few nits to pick here, mostly with a number of places where typos in the form of omitted words, negative statements inadvertently expressed as positives or vice versa, etc. change the meaning of sentences; but I could always tell what was meant. A statement early in the book seems to suggest that Sara has lost her faith, but Ebbs subsequently back-peddles from that. Reno’s Bible at one point is described as a “Lutheran Bible,” so while the author knew about the Christian gospel, he obviously wasn’t much versed in church history. (Many U.S. Lutherans in the 19th century were still German-speaking, so would probably still have used Luther’s 16th-century translation; but any that were English-speaking used the King James Version, like all other Anglophone Protestants.) But these are minor quibbles. Overall, I found this an outstanding entry in the series! However, Barb did not; she greatly/exclusively favors linear plots, so she was VERY put off by Ebbs’ non-linear storytelling here (and also disliked the ending, though I didn’t), to the extent of being soured on the rest of the series. So, we’ll be abandoning it, at least for a while.
Author: A.W. Hart
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 12 of 12 in the Avenging Angels series.