Wild West Week: Bad Hand Man by K. H. Koehler

by Carol4 Comments
I first visited The Skillet in Koehler's The Ace of Spades. It's a rough, tough, alternate Old West with a steampunk feel. Life is downright miserable for Jake Stryker, an indentured servant (slave) for the powerful, rich local family. His friend is an old Indian and they are surviving, but then a Bad Hand Man comes to town, to play a deadly game of poker with Jake's friend. Jake, the son of a dead gambler, takes the matter into his own hands and his life changes forever. But is it better or worse? The Bad Hand Man is just scary. Jake seems him as Death, as a nightmare come to life. The creature must have been at least seven feel tall, a white skeleton wrapped in a black shroud of a duster lined in faded royal purple. Its long white hair glittered like metallic filaments in the greasy light of the oil lamps strung along the walls. Its desert-blasted eyes looked sick...
Read More

Wild West Week: “War Party” by Louis L’Amour

by Carol2 Comments
Image source: The Creative Mama I always associate Louis L'Amour with my grandfather. I can remember him reading his Westerns, and I think I may have even read a couple way back when. He is one of the great, and most well-known, western authors. "War Party" is probably one of L'Amour's best short stories. It has all the right ingredients: a teenage boy on the verge of becoming a man, a resourceful frontier woman, strong and beautiful, and a strong single man who appreciates her. And I love the description of the wide open, beautiful, untamed West. The prairie and sky had a way of trimming folks down to size, or changing them to giants to whom nothing seemed impossible. Bud, the young narrator, and his mom are the people who become the giants. They are part of a wagon train heading West, and when Bud's dad is killed, they keep going. They look at every challenge as something they can overcome. He is...
Read More

Wild West Week: Have Gun, Will Play by Camille LaGuire

by Carol4 Comments
Have Gun, Will Play is the first full length mystery to feature Mick and Casey McKee. I have to tell you again how much I adore this couple of young gunslingers. Mick is the talker, adorable, and at times seems a little clueless. He and his wife Casey are hired after a shoot-out to protect the daughter of a stagecoach king and her bag of toys to a safe haven. Of course, it's not as easy a job as it seems. There's a botched kidnapping, a murder, Mick gets conked on the head, and somebody steals Casey's gun, definitely a bad move. The mystery's good. Plenty of twists and turns keep the plot moving. The dusty, dilapidated Old West feels real, and shoot-outs and heists seem natural. For me, though, Casey and Mick are the shining stars. I haven't met a mystery couple I've enjoyed this much since Tommy and Tuppence. We get to know Mick and Casey well in this story....
Read More

Cooling Down with AC: Murder on the Orient Express

by Carol8 Comments
This is not the first time I've read Murder on the Orient Express, probably not even the second. I've always been a fan of Agatha Christie and devoured her Poirot books when I was probably in junior high, and have never really stopped reading them. The famous Orient Express is stopped in the middle of the night by a snowstorm and in the morning the millionaire Samuel Edward Ratchett is dead in his compartment, stabbed twelve times. One of the passengers must be the murderer. Hercule Poirot, who happens to be on the train, takes control of the investigation, sifting through lies and truths, clues and red herrings, to arrive at the solution. I remembered the ending, which is rather clever, and I do always enjoy Poirot denouncements, the way he takes the smallest clues and using his "little grey cells" solves the crime. This time through the characters caught my attention. Each is their own three-dimensional person, not merely another suspect....
Read More