New Book Released

Volume 2 of The Sorry Life of Bobby Chase-the-Lord is now available at Amazon (https://www.amazoncom/dp/1726838803) for paperback. The Kindle version is at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J4BS4W5.

Volume 1 is available for FREE on Nov 7, 8, and 9 at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2JS39J.

That's what I've been working on for the last couple of months and they were just posted on Amazon within the last few days. Look in the store if those sites above don't take you to the books.

Pretty Polly by Duane Spurlock

Duane Spurlock is one of my favorite writing people and runs the Spur and Lock Blog. Pretty Polly is one of his short stories and I have to say it is a good one.

Griswold Bear, aka Grizzly Bear, is a terrible bad person as shown by the cowboy hanging from a tree upside down. Grizzly's work, and he gets worse in the story and decides to visit the town of  Wicket. Grizzly gets into town and meets the sheriff, Sheriff Shoat. Shoat recognizes him, but since he's leaving town for a couple of days, tells Grizzly to visit Pretty Polly and enjoy a good time.

Grizzly pays a visit to Pretty Polly who works in the local saloon and ........  I have to leave off there before I tell too much, but if you want a good time, get ahold of this short story and laugh your ___ off. It's a well written, fun bit of writing.

The X-Troop by Clay Davis

This book has some minor editing issues, but other than that it was a compelling read with action and suspense. The U.S. President Grant must take steps to prevent the country from being overthrown by a ruthless gang that uses technology to overpower their enemies. So Grant tells General Sheridan he must come up with a plan to defeat these revolutionaries. Sheridan sends for Colonel Orsen Ritter and gives him orders to do just that.

This gang is using a new instrument to defeat anything that prevents them from overthrowing the government.  This new strategy includes heavy tank-like artillery that has never been used in a war and is a formidable object to destroy.

Colonel Rittter devises a new branch of the armed forces, which he names the X-Troop to overcome these thugs. He contacts old army friends he can trust to be quiet about the X-Troop and work hard to defeat this new enemy. They engage in battle and suffer losses, but can't subdue the tanks.

I liked the story and enjoyed the descriptions of the battles and give it four stars for being interesting and fun as Ritter and his men go to war, part science fiction and part old west. A fun novel. 

Our American West by Gary McCarthy

The series Our American West by Gary McCarthy is a non-alphabetized compilation of the various heroes and villains and subjects like Mules and Camels and Railroads, just plain people, etc., that makes up the history of the West. There are a few typos and formatting problems throughout the four books but it was minor enough not to distract me from the narrative. Mister McCarthy covered many characters and subjects, some not well-known and others, very well-known among western writers in general.

From the Earps to the James brothers and Chisholm and Goodnight to Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill, I found the books a wealth of information and reference material and enjoyed them. There were short biographies and essays on various aspects of the West much to my liking and easy to read. Gary McCarthy is a fine writer and researches his material diligently and thoroughly. I give the series my best five-star rating and recommend them to all Western readers.

Silver Shot by Gary McCarthy

How time flies. April shot by like it was only a figment of my imagination and here it is almost the middle of May and past time to give my thoughts on Silver Shot, a novel by Gary McCarthy.

I met Mister McCarthy at the Wickenburg Book Festival on April 7th and he explained how he began writing his series of novels about the "Derby Man." I found it interesting and traded him a couple of my books for an autographed Derby Man book. He gave me two of them.

Anyway, I started with Silver Shot and liked it. Darby Buckingham is the name of the Derby Man, a writer who writes the old-fashioned shoot-'em-ups and he is just putting the finishing touches on his latest called The Pony Express War. in Silver City, Nevada. He hears a ruckus outside his hotel window and before he knows it, he's mixed up with Conrad Trent, a big mining stock manipulator. He and Trent get on opposite sides in the argument when Trent shoots a young Irishman who has stock in the Emerald Mine. Buckingham and Trent are both boxing enthusiasts, Darby, an ex-heavyweight champion, and Trent considers himself to be just as good. Neither would cheat in a match, would they? They soon are engaged in the manly art of fisticuffs under the Marquis of Queensbury Rules, which rules were practically foreign to Darby.

Darby writes a long letter to his girlfriend, Dolly Beavers, inviting her to come to Silver City, and you can guess where this is going. Dolly comes to town and finds out that Darby is mixed up with a Julie Bulette, a prominent lady of the night. Darby has a heckuva time getting out of the predicament he's in with Dolly and Conrad Trent. They all have or buy stock in the Emerald mine and are afraid of losing their money the way Trent is manipulating the stock.

Darby must take things in hand as soon as he and the Bulette woman get out of the mineshaft they have been tossed in to get them out of the way.

I enjoyed reading about the Comstock silver mine and the descriptions of Silver City as the protagonist digs out of the hole. Filled with action and suspense, it is an awesome story to behold and I look forward to reading more of the Derby Man.

I enjoyed meeting and chatting with Gary McCarthy, too, who lives in Arizona, a National  Award Winner and Spur Award Winner.

U.S. Marshal Shorty Thompson by Paul L. Thompson

This episode of the Marshal Shorty Thompson series is Killing of Outlaws.  

In this wild story, the father of Betty Sue Gains is killed by the outlaw Bob Eaves and his gang of marauders and killers. Some mysterious and unknown person or persons are behind this killing and others, as Eaves and his men attempt to drive all the farmers out of the Mesilla Valley in New Mexico and Texas. The man wants all the land to plant cotton.

Betty Sue, a 14-15-year-old, is upset, to put it mildly, that her father was killed. She is going to kill every one of those marauders and outlaws so they can't do more harm to anyone. She needs to find out who is behind it and go get him or them, too. She checks in with the local sheriff in Mesilla and they work together to find out the bigwigs behind all the killing. In no short order, the outlaws start losing men and they can't figure out who the shooter is, thinking it may be a bounty hunter collecting the rewards on all the bad ones.

Sheriff Cole soon sends for Shorty for help. Betty Sue moves in with her friend's family (the Carters) now that she is home alone. She and Jody, the friend and teen-aged boy, spend time together and are familiar with each other, having grown up as close neighbors. Jody helps her out as much as he can, but doesn't really know what she is up to and can't connect the dead men with her. Shorty gets into Mesilla and learns what the situation is and thinks Betty Sue is in the way, always hanging around the sheriff and him.

She makes trips to Las Cruces to see the sheriff and hears about a gent named Glassman. She thinks Glassman is running the outlaws and soon shoots him and several of his men and the sheriff of Las Cruces. Glassman and the sheriff are only wounded.

As Shorty and the law begin to close in on the "big" man, named Jordan, Betty Sue has wiped out the Eaves gang. Glassman goes to El Paso to heal up and hire more gunmen. A trap is set for the new men and Glassman and Jordan as the story begins to wind down.

This is an action-packed novel that kept me interested all the way to the end and that, too. The only thing that I didn't like about it was the misspellings and not paying close attention to the narrative (missing/adding words,etc.). The cowboy dialect was used off and on throughout, which covered over some mistakes and POV was not always clear. Overall, I enjoyed the story that had me on edge throughout to see what happens next. I give it four stars and will read more of the Shorty Thompson books as time allows.

Events Coming Up

The annual Parada del Sol Rodeo will run from MARCH 8 TO 11, THIS MONTH IN SCOTTSDALE, AZ.There will be horses, steers, dances, concerts, live Western Music and other activities. Y'all come and have a great time.

St. Patrick's Day Parade and Irish Family Faire will take place on March 17th. Parade begins at 10:00  AM and ends up at Margaret Hance Park in downtown Phoenix.

Scottsdale Arts Festival, March 9-11. One of the top festivals in the nation with artists from the US and Canada, continuous live music and food (woops!) culinary arts.  In Scottsdale, yep.

Spring training baseball all over the valley continues this month. Flip a coin on where to see a game, Peoria? Surprise? Phoenix? Maryvale? or Scottsdale and Glendale? Beer and hot dogs galore! Fifteen teams to choose from!

Ain't Spring Grand?

Slow John by C. J. Petit

Slow John by C. J. Petit is a fine story, somewhat long, but well told. It starts with a Prologue that sets up the whole thing, in which John Flynn (Slow John) is fighting in the Civil War, but the Army sends his Ma and Pa a telegram that he had been killed unbeknownst to John. John continues fighting and is transferred to the frontier to fight the Indians in Nebraska and the Dakotas. There is a girl, Kate, who gets defiled by John's brother, Jack, introduced in the Prologue.

The story gets underway as John is ready to get mustered out of the Army in Omaha, not far from his home in Bellevue, which he hadn't visited in the years of the War. He makes a short visit to his old hometown where most of the people he had known are now gone including his family. He was hoping he might get a clue to where they had moved by talking to anyone he used to know. "They went west" was about all he could glean. At the hardware store, he runs into an old acquaintance Melissa and scares her husband to death, literally.

He heads west to find his family and makes a camp on the south side of the Platte River where he runs across a sod house sitting by itself. In the house is a girl, Kate, the one defiled by his brother. She is being kept captive by three men (father and two sons) for their own gratification. Slow John kills them and leaves with Kate.

You can see where this is going, I think, as John falls in love with Kate and has a couple more run-ins with bad "hombres".  I won't belabor you with the ending, which you may find exciting because I want you, the reader, to discover what happens. I would give the story four stars, but the book itself, I would have to give it three stars for the misspelled words and words left out, which another proofreading would probably clear up.