Synopses & Reviews
When his adoptive father is bushwhacked and killed in Texas in 1861, Rusty Shannon rides to fort Belknap on the Brazos River and joins the Texas Rangers. Mike Shannon's death haunts him; he owed his life to Mike, who rescued him from a Comanche War party when he was a child, and rusty thinks he knows the killer's identity. With Texas now in the throes of secession, Union sympathizers are regarded as traitors and it is Rusty's fate to fall in love with the daughter of such a sympathizer and fall afoul of the zealots who want to hang all Unionists.
Rusty has his hands full fighting for the law in lawless Texas, and for the life of Geneva Monahan and her family--and is also heading for a showdown with the Buffalo Caller, The Comanche warrior who killed his family over twenty years ago.
Review
"Kelton is a genuine craftsman with an ear for dialogue and, more importantly, an understanding of the human heart."--
Booklist"Elmer Kelton is to Texas what Mark Twain was to the Mississippi River."--Jory Sherman, author of The Barons of Texas
Recently votes the Greatest Western Writer of All Time by the Western Writers of America, Kelton creates characters more complex than L'Amour's....Kelton adds surprisingly strong elements of humanity, remorse, reversals of character, and terrific nobility of the "red devils". Wonderfully satisfying, sophisticated, unsentimental, superbly crafted, and full of a whopping good humor out of Twain. Hard to beat."--Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
In this "rousing tale of the Texas Rangers" ("Publishers Weekly"), a ranger sets out to avenge the murder of his adoptive father and, in the process, meets up with the Comanche warrior whose band killed his family in a raid when he was a child.
About the Author
Elmer Kelton, author of more than forty novels, grew up on a ranch near Crane, Texas, and earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas. His first novel,
Hot Iron, was published in 1956. For forty-two years he had a parallel career in agricultural journalism.
Among his awards have been seven Spurs from Western Writers of America and four Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Among his best-known works have been The Time It Never Rained and The Good Old Boys, the latter made into a television film starring Tommy Lee Jones.
He served in the infantry in World War II. He and his wife, Ann, a native of Austria, live in San Angelo, Texas. They have three children, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.