Godfall (2023) - Van Jensen

 

“No one knew where the thing came from. What it was. How it remained unseen for so long. Only that it was three miles long, head to toe. If it didn’t change course, in six days and twenty-two hours it would make landfall in the United States. Models were forecasting western Nebraska. At the speed it was going, it would strike the earth like a bullet. An extinction-level event…"

But that’s not really what happens.

Instead, as it approaches rural Nebraska, what turns out to be an alien corpse falls slower and slower before rather gently landing just outside Little Springs, Nebraska. No one dies. No one is even injured. But almost immediately, a swarm of military personnel, FBI agents, scientists, cultists, foreign spies, and conspiracy theorists hits Little Springs - and Sheriff David Blunt’s problems are just about to begin. In the end, the Sheriff will be lucky to survive the invasion of his little town, because almost immediately people start to die - and it looks like the string of murders is directly connected to the massive, supposedly dead, alien.

Godfall is not as much of a science fiction novel as its title and basic plot might lead readers to believe it to be. It is much more a solidly crafted police procedural in which the Sheriff, with a mixed bag of help and opposition from the FBI and the military, tries to catch a serial killer who is relentlessly picking off his victims one by one. That so many of the killer’s victims are townspeople personally closest to Sheriff Blunt makes it all the more urgent that the killer be stopped quickly. The job would be a lot easier, though, if Blunt could tell the difference between those he can trust and those who are lying to him.

This is a well done mashup of the science fiction and murder mystery genres that will probably please fans of the mystery genre a bit more than it will please science fiction fans. In truth, the scifi here is really rather limited in comparison to the space given to catching the town’s serial killer. It helps that the novel’s characters are distinctive enough to keep them all straight, with Sheriff Blunt and his journalist cousin being particularly well developed ones.

If you are a fan of both science fiction and of mysteries, Godfall is definitely one you should take a look at, but even non-scifi fans will enjoy this one.

A Brief Visit to College Station Pays Off

College Station, home to Texas A&M University, is only about 75 miles from my front door, so I enjoy driving up there every few months to see what might turn up in the city’s bookstores. Even though I ended up doing more selling (I hope) than buying this time around, I did come home with five additions to my home library. I’ve decided to begin selling off my collection of Civil War books, nonfiction and fiction alike, and a little indie bookstore in Bryan (College Station’s neighbor) has shown some interest in those. So there’s that.

The new book I’m most tickled about is the 1943 wartime edition of Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Buried Clock, shown above. Despite its age, there is no spotting or discoloration on any of the book’s 250 pages. Considering that this Grosset & Dunlap edition is just a cheaper edition of the William Morrow "Victory Edition"of the book, that’s a pleasant surprise. The inside flap of the book jacket says this in red letters:

This book, while produced under wartime conditions, in full compliance with government regulations for the conservation of paper and other essential materials, is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED.

The book’s copyright page adds this:

* VICTORY EDITION*

 The typographical size and format of this book are in accordance with the paper conservation orders of the War Production Board.

I saw almost a dozen other Perry Mason books from the same era today, but the pages in all of them were so discolored that I passed on buying any but this one. From the drastic difference in its condition compared to the others on the same shelf, I don’t think it was acquired by the store from the same seller. 

I also found three Carlos Ruiz Zafón paperbacks published in the UK. Two of them The Prisoner of Heaven and The Angel’s Game are part of Zafón’s well known “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books” series, a series you should definitely try if you haven’t already done so. Because I’ve not read any of Zafón’s shorter work, I’m particularly looking forward to the third, The City of Mist, a slim collection of eleven of the author's short stories. The covers of the three are very similar, so I’ll just share this one to give you an idea of what they look like:

And finally, there’s this collection of critical essays by Harold Bloom on the key works of novelists ranging from Cervantes to Amy Tan. If I’ve counted correctly, there are 77 essays, sorted by birth year, with Cervantes being the oldest and Tan the youngest. I’m really curious to see what Bloom had to say about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian because I’m still very underwhelmed by it at the 60% mark. I can tell that the collection's previous owner, a female with beautiful handwriting, started reading the collection with great intentions - but she seems to have lost interest pretty quickly. I hope I use the book more than she did.

I really enjoyed the day, so much in fact, that I plan to make a similar trip up to Huntsville sometime in June or July. Sam Houston University is the school in that town, and Sam Houston is very much a part of that city’s history. I haven’t visited for a couple of years, so it will be fun to visit Sam’s gravesite and the spectacular museum dedicated to his memory again. And maybe they have a bookstore worth visiting now…who knows?

What I’m Reading This Week (5/26/26)

 While I did finish two books last week, Godfall by Van Jensen and The Little Liar by Mitch Albom, it seems like I’ve been doing way more " book grazing” than I usually do. When I grow temporarily weary of a book, instead of just picking up another book I have already invested a lot of reading time into, I find myself reading the first chapters of  random books or maybe a short story or two from some anthology I have on hand. So this week calls for a little regrouping on my part.

I’m almost 500 pages into the Twain bio, but the steam has kind of gone out of that one for now, so it’s slow going. And to one degree or another, I’m also struggling with Blood Meridian and The Camp of the Saints. On the other hand, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say is going well, especially as I get deeper into the family dynamics of that one, and it’s the one I hate to put down right now. 

My book grazing, though, has given me some options for what I will be turning to next:

Future Boy is a relatively brief memoir from Canadian actor Michael J. Fox. This is not anything approaching an autobiographical length memoir; rather, it primarily covers the months at the beginning of Fox’s Hollywood career during which he was simultaneously working on the first Back to the Future movie at night and finishing up the third season of his very popular television series, Family Ties, during the day. Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies, and Fox has such a natural, likable screen personality that my curiosity about how he managed to pull this off at such a young age made Future Boy impossible to resist for very long. 

I am a total sucker when it comes to books about books, especially the kind written by people who turn them into mini-memoirs along the way. That seems to be what Lucy Mangan has done with Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. To this point, I’ve only read the Introduction to the book, but I’m finding it almost conversational in style, and I have high hopes for it. I particularly like this quote from the intro, “…if you read without self-consciousness or snobbery, you are liberated: free to enjoy whatever comes your way and makes you happy…” That is exactly the reading philosophy I’ve employed most of my life, and I recommend it to all new readers - or light readers - I run across.

I’ve been on a time travel novel kick lately, so A Rip in Time easily caught my eye. It’s not the most “serious” take on the subject, but I’m definitely having fun with it so far. The basic premise is that a young detective from the US goes to Scotland to be with her dying grandmother, but while there she is targeted by a serial killer and nearly strangled to death. She survives, but wakes up in 1850s Scotland inside the body of another young woman from that time period who was strangled by the same man in the same place. It’s been fun watching her figure out how to adapt to her new circumstances while trying to come up with a way to travel back to the present. Of course, she’s going to try to catch the killer. That’s just who she is despite the new body she’s wearing. 

I have quite a few short story anthologies like The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (2022) around, but I tend to forget that I have them. In an attempt to force myself finally to pay some attention to books like this one, I’ve placed it prominently on top of my desk. I plan to dip into it when the short story mood strikes me - and I hope to find some “new” mystery writers to explore further that way. There are 21 stories in the collection, so that seems likely. 

That’s the plan for this holiday-shortened week. I hope that you all had a great Memorial Day celebration, and I look forward to seeing what you have to say this week. 

The Dentist (UK 2020) (US 2025) - Tim Sullivan

 Where it comes to the things I like most about crime fiction, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist ticks most of the boxes for me. Most importantly, Sullivan writes the kind of methodical, steady paced police procedural that has become harder and harder to find in recent years because today's publishers seem to prefer publishing crime thrillers in which every other chapter ends with a shocking twist or ciffhanger designed to keep the reader turning pages as fast as possible. While those can be fun for a while, a steady diet of them can  get me to the burnout stage pretty quickly. I much prefer procedurals like The Dentist that give me time enough to think right along with the investigative team working the crime.

But it gets even better.

The Dentist is book one in what is currently an eight-book series featuring DS George Cross - and it’s the Cross character that transforms an already solid murder mystery into something truly exceptional. Cross, you see, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a subset of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a disorder with some symptoms and traits that cause him severe social interaction problems and others that make him into the almost perfect detective. 

Among the more problematic traits are: 

• an extreme difficulty making or maintaining eye contact,
• taking all conversation literally because of an inability to recognize sarcasm, implied meanings, puns, or jokes,
• a difficulty reading facial expressions and knowing when and how to enter or leave conversations, 
• being exhausted by the extra effort required to survive any kind of social interaction, and
• anxiety generated by crowds, noise, or particular smells. 

On the other hand, Asperger’s allows Cross:

• a strong memory for details related to topics he takes an interest in,
• the expertise to recognize order, pattern recognition, structure, and routines - and the ability to sense when those have been disrupted, along with
• a talent for splitting goals into precise step-by-step lists that give him great pleasure to complete.

While I found DS Cross to be a very sympathetic character, and  admired his efforts to compensate for his social shortcomings, I also appreciated the typically dry British humor that was generated by Cross’s habit of taking everything around him so literally. Never was the humor mean spirited, and it only made me like the Cross character even more. This is a fun detective series that I intend to fully explore over the next months. 

What I’m Reading This Week (5/18/26)

 I turned a lot of pages last week but ended up only actually finishing one book, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist. I really like the way that Sullivan develops his characters, especially Cross who suffers from Asperger Syndrome, and I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the DS Cross series soon. 

I’m over halfway through Godfall now, and I’m still trying to answer one of the questions I had coming in: is this a mystery or is it a scifi novel? At this point, the author seems to be focusing more on the serial killer who has come to town along with the alien, but I’m really looking forward to how he ultimately resolves the issue of a three-mile-tall alien dropping from the sky. 

I’m struggling a bit with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but that doesn’t surprise me much. I struggle with McCarthy in exactly the same way that I struggle with Faulkner. Those long descriptive sentences demand so much concentration that I can only read the book when I am most alert. So if I don’t read from Blood Meridian early in the day, it’s just as well that I pass on it for the whole day. Otherwise, I often end up reading the same long paragraph two or three times to make sure that I haven’t missed something important. The result is that I’m only about 130 pages into this one.

I’m doing my monthly 200-mile round trip drive for lunch with friends from my high school graduating class this week so, in addition to Godfall and Blood Meridian, I’ll be adding a new audio book to get me through those four hours of driving - plus these two:

I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Strout’s novels, and I’ve fully explored her Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge worlds now, especially getting a kick out of the way she intertwines the two worlds. I’m always ready for more about those ladies, but The Things We Never Say is a standalone focusing on a 57-year-old high school teacher called Artie Dam who is struggling with a kind of deep loneliness that would surprise his friends and students. The real irony is that Artie is married to a therapist. This one has been well received by Strout fans and critics alike.

The Camp of the Saints seems to be quite controversial these days. It is a French novel written in 1973 by Jean Raspail that predicted the open borders situation that the world is dealing with today. I’m only about thirty pages into the novel, but it begins on the morning that a fleet of ragtag boats is arriving on the beaches of France with almost a million impoverished Indians onboard. The novel was out of print for a long time, and a 2025 reprint was taken down by Amazon a couple of weeks ago over an “offensive content” issue before it was re-listed due to the feedback the take down received. I decided to see what the big deal was for myself. Is this a racist rant or is it a prophetic novel…or can it be both, I wonder. 

I’ve chosen The Little Liar by Mitch Albom for Wednesday’s road trip. I’m not much of a Mitch Albom fan, but this one seems to be different from the others of his I’ve read. It tells the story of an eleven-year-old Jewish boy duped by the Nazis into working with them to convince his neighbors that they have nothing to fear when boarding the trains to “new jobs and safety.” He only figures it all out after his own family is “herded into a boxcar” headed to Auschwitz. This sounds perfect for what has become a rather boring drive over the years…not too complicated, but not too mindlessly silly either. 

So that’s it for the next few days. I look forward to seeing what you all are up to.

Return to Sender (2025) - Craig Johnson

 

Return to Sender is the twenty-first book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, and I’ve read every single one of them. I’ve also watched the entire Longmire television series, so you can definitely consider me a fan of Craig Johnson’s work, someone quite familiar with Walt and his surrounding cast of characters. But as much as I still look forward to the next Walt Longmire mystery, there’s one thing I learned about the stories a long time ago: they are strongest and the most fun when Walt doesn't go all solo on us. Walt is just a better sheriff, man, and fictional character when he has Henry Standing Bear, Vic Moretti, Lucian Connally, Ruby, and Cady Longmire around to shake up his personal life a bit. Johnson always produces a good, solid mystery thriller for his readers to enjoy, but what makes them special for longtime fans are Walt’s interactions with all the other series regulars.

Unfortunately, Walt’s gone and done it again in Return to Sender. This time he’s off on his own working undercover as a mailman in a remote county of Wyoming as he tries to find a mail lady who disappeared while driving her regular 307-mile route. Walt is not very good at undercover work, as he himself readily admits, so he’s outed fairly quickly by the locals even though for a little while he thinks he’s fooling them. His search soon leads him to a weird UFO cult in the middle of the Red Desert called The Order of the Red Gate that the mail lady seems to be connected with somehow. But, while looking for her, Walt learns disturbing details about the cult and its leaders that will make it near impossible for him to rescue everyone there who needs immediate rescuing. And he’s on his own because even the county cops are not able to offer him a whole lot of timely help way out in the middle of the desert. It’s pretty much up to Walt and Dog, his loyal canine, if this one is going to end well. 

Thankfully, there are a few pages near the middle of the book where Walt joins Vic, Henry, Cady, Ruby, and Lucien in Cheyenne for a black-tie reception. It’s only an overnighter, but it is a welcomed break in what is otherwise merely a solid mystery thriller that could easily be read as a standalone novel instead of as the most recent book in a popular two-decade-old series. Johnson seems to be going that direction more and more - and that’s kind of a shame.

Time and Again (1970) - Jack Finney

 It’s strange to me how some books can stick in your mind so firmly that even after more than fifty years you still remember the very first time you became aware of their existence. Time and Again is one of those books for me. 

My wife and I were living in Houston in mid-1972 and had driven about 110 miles back to the two little towns we had been raised in so that we could visit our folks for the first time in several months. Port Arthur had recently opened up a new library near my in-laws that caught my eye, and I decided to drop by for a quick look. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to borrow any of the books, but still couldn’t resist browsing the shelves for a few minutes anyway. But I never even made it to the shelves that day because a brand new copy of Time and Again was sitting on top of a little display between the front door and the shelves I was headed toward. The book looked interesting so I settled into a nearby chair with it for a closer look, and would hardly move again for the next two hours before reluctantly putting the book back where I found it and leaving the library to pack for home. And I was so curious about how Finney’s story would end that I bought my own copy as soon as I could make it to a Houston bookstore the following week. 

That’s the exact copy of the book I just re-read for the first time since 1972.

Finney’s story is not one involving time machines, wormholes, or parallel universes, and in a way, that makes it all the more believable. His time-travelers are specially recruited men and women who can immerse themselves into period-correct settings until they are able to use self-hypnosis to travel back in time. Si Morley is one of the few recruits actually able to pull off the stunt, and after a brief foray to 1882 New York City, during which his visit  does not impact the present, he is allowed to return to January 1882 with strict instructions that his is to be only an observer, that he is not to interact with anyone he meets. Well, that’s easier said than done.

Si takes a room in a boardinghouse where he is smitten by Julia, niece of the woman who owns the home. He knows that nothing can come of his feelings for Julia, but when he learns that she is engaged to a man Si knows will destroy her life, he does his best to make sure that their marriage will never happen. 

“Observe, don’t interfere: It was a rule easy to formulate and of obvious necessity at the project…where the people of this time were only ghosts long vanished from reality nothing remaining of them but odd-looking sepia photographs lying in old albums or in nameless heaps shoved under antique-store counters in cardboard boxes. But where I was now, they were alive. Where I was now, Julia’s life wasn’t long since over and forgotten; it still lay ahead. And was as valuable as any other. That was the key: If in my own time I couldn’t stand by and allow the life of a girl I knew and liked to be destroyed if I could prevent it, I finally knew that I couldn’t do it here either."

Could Si, by dooming their potential children never to be born, be negatively impacting the future? It’s a chance he’s willing to take, but when the project bosses do a complete one-eighty and task him with doing something in the past that will have historical significance in the present, he begins to doubt himself. Now what does he do?

Time and Again would be great fun even if this were all there was to it, but there’s more. What makes the book so special, in my estimation, are all the sketches and historical photos used to illustrate the 1882 world that Si is traveling back to. (My particular favorite is a photo of the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty sitting on the grounds of Madison Square before the statue was fully assembled where it stands today.) The attention to detail makes it easy to imagine the very different New York City that Si is trying to figure out, and survive, all by himself. 

This was a successful re-read. I come away from it with a deeper appreciation for what Finney accomplished with Time and Again, if maybe a little less excitement than then I felt the first time around. And that’s on me. After all, I was in my twenties the first time I read the book, and I’m in my seventies now. A lot has changed, not me the least. 

What I’m Reading This Week (5/11/26)

 Reading four or five books at the same time often means finishing two or three of them within a day or two of each other, and that’s what happened to me last week. I finished Time and Again, Jack Finney’s classic time travel novel, Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, and Return to Sender, book number 21 in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series all within a few days. And while I continue to read John Chernow’s Mark Twain bio, I’ve been neglecting it for at least a week now. Instead, I’ve started three new ones all pretty much at the same time:

The Dentist is the first book in Tim Sullivan’s DS Cross series. As of the moment, there are eight books in the series, but I’m just now beginning to explore the Cross character mainly because of the tremendous enthusiasm Cathy over at Kittling: Books has been showing for the series for the last few months. I’m primarily drawn to the series because its central character, George Cross, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that his fellow cops can tolerate only because of the guy’s tremendous talent for solving murders. I’m really enjoying this first book.

Godfall is just too weird to ignore. This one is a sci-fi murder mystery, and I’m not sure yet which genre is going to be most emphasized. Picture a three-mile-tall alien (who seems to be dead) crashing into a remote part of Nebraska. The sheriff of Little Springs now has to contend with all the government agents, scientists, and cult weirdos who descend on his little town - along with a string of murders that seem to somehow be connected to the town’s newly arrive giant resident. I’ve only read the opener so far, but I find Van Jensen’s writing style very comfortable and I’m looking forward to getting deeper in…soon.

I’ve only read two or three Cormac McCarthy novels, but have been meaning to revisit his work again for a while now. I picked up this copy of Blood Meridian last year, so it seems like a good place to jump back in. McCarthy’s prose has always seemed a little intimidating to me for some reason, but I’ve found the first three chapters of Blood Meridian not to be that way. It’s about the “Kid,” a fourteen-year-old drifter from Tennessee who stumbles into the bloody, nightmarish world that was the Texas-Mexico border in 1850. McCarthy’s books can be very brutal, and this one is no exception. 

These three are going to get the bulk of my reading time for the next week or so unless I end up abandoning one of them, something I don’t see much chance of happening with this bunch. The fun part of beginning three books within something like a three-day window is waiting to see which one, if any, ends up dominating my reading time because it hits me harder than the others. That ends up happening more times than not. I hope you all have a great reading week ahead of you. Have fun!

Buckeye (2025) - Patrick Ryan

 

Buckeye is a multi-generational family saga following the evolution of  two small town Ohio families from the 1920s to the 1980s. The book’s central character is Cal Jenkins, a young man who is born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. Still dejected because he is physically ineligible for World War II military service, Cal marries Becky, a hometown girl who sometimes is able to make minimal contact with the dead, a talent that compounds Cal’s feelings of his own inadequacy. The other family in the story is comprised of two outsiders who move to Bonhomie as adults: Margaret, who grew up in an orphanage, and Felix, who was transferred to the town after receiving a job promotion at another Ohio location. 

The two families become indelibly linked on VE Day when Margaret goes to town for some shopping and suddenly starts hearing loud chatter and cheers on the street. Sensing significant war news, she rushes into Cal’s hardware store hoping that he has a radio she can listen to the good news on. Then, in celebratory excitement, Margaret impulsively kisses Cal on her way out of the store, and that single kiss ignites a spark that will directly impact the lives of everyone in both families for at least two generations. 

Because of the risk of spoiling the novel for future readers, I’m going to stop with just those plot details.

Patrick Ryan, despite his tendency to do as much “telling” as “showing” in his storytelling, creates several memorable characters in Buckeye. Cal, because of his insecurities about not being enough of a man to fight alongside his friends and neighbors, seems very real. Becky is a goodhearted woman who finds meaning in her life by connecting the dead to those they left behind, never charging a dime for her time or services. Margaret’s coming-of-age story in the orphanage is one that deserves a novel of its own, and Felix, her husband, is a man desperately struggling to determine exactly what kind of man he wants to be for the rest of his life. Each of the four are as interesting as they are different from one another, but it is when they begin to interact that the sparks really begin to fly.

Buckeye is a novel about keeping secrets from those closest to you, and how keeping those secrets can create enough guilt, resentment, and anger to destroy the very relationships you were trying to protect in the first place. It explores the definition of masculinity and comes up with some surprising conclusions. It is about small town America during World War II, an era during which people knew their neighbors along with most of their secrets - and all the good and the bad that came with that closeness. Buckeye is a longish novel in which whatever action there is can seem to develop very slowly at times, and I considered abandoning it at one point, but the characters, and their predicament, kept me coming back. And I’m glad I did. 

Stand Proud (1984) - Elmer Kelton

 I first read Elmer Kelton’s Stand Proud sometime back in the eighties,  and that was plenty long enough ago for this re-read to feel like I was reading it for the very first time. I remembered almost no details concerning the book’s plot, and had only a general memory of how much I enjoyed the story the first time around. It turns out that Stand Proud explores a theme that Larry McMurtry and quite a few other writers of westerns have explored in their own fiction over the years: what happens to violent men who outlive their usefulness to society once times have changed for the better. 

Frank Claymore is one of those men.

During the Civil War, Frank had been one of the young militia men who stayed home to protect Texas settlers from the deadly raids of the Comanche Indians who were still not willing to cede Texas to the newcomers. The situation was so desperate that the Confederacy had to stop conscripting men from that part of the state so that the small farms and ranches could survive the war years. Twenty-two-year-old Frank was one of those small ranchers himself, but all able-bodied men were required to put time in with the militia - and he put in more than most.

Frank came out of the war years with three things: a wound that would plague him the rest of his life, the location of a remote grassland valley that he would claim for himself, and a mortal enemy and competitor for everything he held dearest. 

And now, over 40 years later, Frank sits in a courtroom to be judged by a jury composed of small ranch owners who resent him and all he has claimed for himself. He is accused of murder, but is still determined to play by his own rules, damn the consequences. And it’s not looking good for him.

Each chapter of Stand Proud opens on a day of Frank’s trial, followed by a longer section from Frank’s past. This allows the reader to compare the young Frank Claymore to the elderly version, and to learn the truth, in detail, about what is being testified to in the courtroom. This construction works remarkably well to explain what kind of man Frank is and why someone as respected as he once was could find himself in a mess like this one so near the end of his life. 

Stand Proud is nothing like the stereotypical pulp fiction western readers unfamiliar with the genre too often think of when they think “western” novel. This is a character-driven story in which relationships and longtime grudges drive all the action, a story where disagreements are more likely to be settled by fists rather than by guns. Kelton’s later novels, such as The Time It Never Rained, The Day the Cowboy’s Quit, and The Good Old Boys brought ever more realism to his stories about the cowboying life and its relationship to an ever-changing Texas landscape. The Western Writers of America once went so far as to proclaim Kelton “the greatest Western writer of all time.” I might not go quite that far in my praise of the man, but I will tell you that his fiction has entertained me for a long, long time. And that I appreciate him. 

An American Outlaw (2013) - John Stonehouse

 An American Outlaw is the first book in John Stonehouse’s popular series featuring US Marshal John Whicher. There are now eight books in the series, including one novella, with the latest novel Wolves of the Evening, having just been published in March 2026. This is my first exposure to the series so I don’t know how typical An American Outlaw is to the other seven books, but I’ve been told that Stonehouse writes them as standalone stories that can be read in any order the reader prefers. 

In this first one, Gulf War veteran Gilman James (a distant relative of the famous outlaw Jesse James) comes home to find that two of his childhood buddies never recovered from the mental and emotional wounds they suffered in the same war. They are broken men, and James wants to help them. But that takes money, lots of it, because no one else seems much willing to give these men the kind of help they have every right to expect from a grateful nation. 

James is a man with few prospects of his own, but he will do whatever it takes to get his hands on however much money it takes to help his friends put their lives back together. The icing on the cake is that he plans to steal all of that money from the very people who have directly made their lives so much worse than they should be. James and his two buddies start a series of armed robberies in Lafayette, Louisiana that all falls apart in a little West Texas bank, and now US Marshal John Whicher, along with numerous other law enforcement officers, is determined to stop the men before they can cross the Mexican border. 

Whicher is a veteran investigator who tries to stay one jump ahead of whomever he’s chasing by getting inside their heads deeply enough to anticipate their next move. That skill works well for him but sometimes, as in this case, Whicher can become too empathetic for his own good. And that’s dangerous.

An American Outlaw is a shoot-em-up manhunt story in which the action seldom slows down. Along the way, though, Stonehouse effectively visits the themes of war’s toll on those who do the actual fighting, loyalty, and the gray areas between guilt and innocence. John Stonehouse gives his readers a lot to think about between the gunshots.