Customer Reviews

Longarm and the Gila River Murders (Longarm, No. 369)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This srory starts out innocently enough right in Denver where Longarm calls home.Walking past the Denver Mint on his way to his office in the Federal Building,all hell breaks out.The first thing he knows,he's involved in a shootout and saves a young lady who is who has been shot and nearly run over by a freight wagon.
Longarm soon finds out that this young woman was intended to be murdered by an assassin who was hired to eliminate her and allow her family's struggling ranch, back in Arizona, to be taken over by unscrupulous businessmen.
Since there is no Federal crime involved,Longarm gets his boss,Billy Vail,to allow him to take his own vacation time,and escort the girl back home and bring the scoundrels to justice.In this situation,you are going to see Longarm's true feelings come into play and he gets personally involved as you seldom see him do do in most cases.
It is a good fast moving story,and has several interesting and well developed charcters.There is never any mystery as who the bad guys are and what they are up to.
The assassin in this case is a known hit man and feared by everyone who has ever crossed paths with him.They give Longarm less than no chance in surviving an encounter with the assassin and his band of outlaws including bloodthirsty Apache cohorts. It is a real Old West manhunt to the finish and a page turner from beginning to end.

Deputy Marshal Custis Long is again up to his neck in trouble. Right from the beginning a huge brute of a man is shooting at him as he walked across the street. On top of that, a wagon almost runs over a woman who had been shot by the same man who shot at him.

The first few chapters are exciting but the story slows down somewhat until chapter fifteen, where the action picks up until the final chapter where there is a shootout with the bad guy and his pals.

I realize that there are probably different writers who are using the pen name of Tabor Evans writing the many different Longarm novels, but it is easy to see the differences in the character, depending on who is writing the novel. Even though the basic character traits of Custis Long are part of the formula; nevertheless, it is easy to tell from the dialog used that there is a different writer. In some of the Longarm books the dialog is pure colorful western lingo and other times the colorful language is missing. I wish the publishers would stay with the main writer(s) and be more consistent with how Custis Long is supposed to be speaking.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this book but not as much as other Longarm western stories.
Rating: 3 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Use of the Monadnock Straight Baton).