SUBTRACTION

A wronged woman sets out for revenge in this classic Western novella.

The authors employ an old but still serviceable action/adventure trope: 12 years ago (1857), bad guys killed Clara Kane’s parents, torched their homestead, and assumed that Clara and her older brother, Elias, had perished in the fire. Ever since, Clara has devoted her life to vengeance. Not only has she become a methodical killer, but her methods show an obsession with numbers and equations that borders on the synesthetic. (Even as a child, for example, she insisted that seven was sharp but three was round.) When readers first meet her, she’s measuring absolutely every variable as she picks off three of her victims at an impossibly long range, accounting for mass, gravity, windage, and so on. Her archenemy is General Titus Creed, who’s set up “New Rome,” a city in Colorado that he’s modeled on the Eternal City, complete with faux-marble (adobe) walls and a colosseum for deadly entertainments. Clara makes her way there and begins picking off the remaining 17 bad guys by gun, knife, and other means. In a final showdown, and with the help of her brother (who also has his motives for revenge), they kill everyone whom the Kane siblings intended to, even those not directly involved in crimes against their family. The story then becomes a rumination on revenge: What are the real costs of vengeance, and, more to the point, what does revenge do to the soul of the avenger? Crossley and Gibson provide drama mostly through Clara’s eyes and inside her head, or in descriptive gems such as “Dawn comes to New Rome like a blade drawn slow across a throat.” Readers might not know what to make of General Creed, a classic Bond villain type, which is what made Fleming’s series so entertaining. And what of Clara’s calculation before jumping out a window (“Broken ankle probability: 67%”): Is this unintentional comedy? Clara would not just beat Annie Oakley hands down; she’d also give Lara Croft a run for her money. Crossley and Gibson are certainly having fun, and hopefully readers will, too.

A bracingly sophisticated but highly entertaining tale that doesn’t take itself too seriously.