TEXAS VENDETTA

Honored as the Greatest Western Writer of All Time, Kelton offers his fortysomethingth novel, carrying forward his Texas Ranger series begun with The Buckskin Line, Badger Boy, and 2001’s The Way of the Coyote (the first three have been reprinted in one volume as Lone Star Rising.) It can only be said that Kelton’s vision of the roles of the Texas Rangers offers a prism that brings the brightest facets of Texas’s post–Civil War decade into a single image that’s richer and more graspable here than in nonfiction of the Southwest for that period—and Kelton’s spacious eye will leave readers hungry for more. The novels together strive for the epic sweep of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, though Kelton, in spite of a gift for humor, lacks McMurtry’s high talent for words baked in the landscape and for full-bodied characters who loom like myth. In the present installment, Andy Pickard and Farley Brackett set out to deliver Jayce Landon to trial for the murder of Ned Hopper. But their job finds them caught between the feuding Landon and Hopper families, who have differing views on whether Jayce should stand trial, be freed, or simply killed on sight.

Storytelling as rich as a bank ripe for robbing. Its quietly knifelike sentences will skin you alive.