COMANCHE CAPTIVE

A resolute woman teams up with a retired soldier in this Western set in post–Civil War Texas.

In this first volume of a historical fiction trilogy, Conhaim tells the stories of Laura Little, a White woman determined to return to the Comanche family she lived with for years, and Scott Renald, the retired soldier intent on bringing her back to her White relatives. In the book’s opening pages, Laura escapes from the mental institution where her prominent White family confined her after bringing her back to Fort Worth. Scott, in the course of pursuing the survivors of a stagecoach attack, meets Laura while she is being held by the Tonkawa. Although she is not the captive he was commissioned to find, Laura decides he is her best chance for returning to her own tribe and joins him. They make their way through the Texas desert, and when Scott learns that Laura has ties to the wife and sister he lost many years earlier, he agrees to return to the Comanche settlement with her to pursue his own goals. Factions of soldiers, Comanche, Tonkawa, and White civilians deal with one another as players in the United States’ efforts to establish its control over the West. The author is a cinematic writer, and his descriptions of shootouts (Laura “inched the rifle barrel into daylight, a movement detectable to anybody on the lookout”) and settings (“Peering eastward across the divide to where the stream jackknifed, [Scott] caught sight of its telltale marker—a two-pronged natural rock formation, eighty feet high, that to thirsty conquistadors had once resembled a pair of sherry casks”) are captivating. The novel’s major limitation is its adherence to stereotypical language: Although Conhaim displays substantial knowledge of the tribes he writes about and creates Native American characters who are as fully developed as his White players, the book’s narration, which is largely from the point of view of Scott and other White men, is full of references to “braves” and “squaws.” Many readers may find these descriptions off-putting.

An engrossing and well-written tale of the Old West.