COUNTERFEIT MADAM
as by Jon Sharpe
Signet, Sept. 1990
Canyon O’Grady rode into Stillwater hunting the source of a flood of phony government bonds that could drown the country in a sea of bad debt. What he found was a lumber war that painted the town red with gore...a scarlet lady who lusted after red-blooded men...and a master of deception who made the redheaded Canyon turn crimson with rage. Caught in a maze of deadly double-dealing, nothing was what it seemed - except the bullets flying and the corpses dropping...
Jon Sharpe - this time writer Chester Cunningham - presents the reader with a not to taxing read. The plot, and bad guys, aren’t kept secret from the reader so making this an easy to follow storyline. Personally I would have liked the who and whys to have remained a mystery until the end so as to add more suspense to the story.
Around this time Cunningham was writing his Spur series as Dirk Fletcher. Spur being a federal investigator like Canyon with counterfeiting being the plot of many of the Spur books, I found myself thinking this could easily be a Spur story. A little more fleshing out of Canyon’s character would, perhaps, have separated the two more.
Not the best Canyon O’Grady book I’ve read but good enough for some light entertainment.
5 comments:
Steve - where do you find all these books? Is it in secondhand shops, jumbles etc?
I've been collecting them for years, of course the internet has really helped and I used to search various booksellers lists of westerns - usually via ABE, but that doesn't seem as easy now - and bought boxes at a time. It used to be possible to have the sent over from America via ship but that service seems to have finished and airmail is the only option now making it much more expensive. I often browse American ebay too and have bought quite a few that way.
I also new an airhostess who flew regualrly to America and she often had a few hour to kill so would go western hunting for me and brought me back boxes of them.
I have a friend who visits America every Christmas and as her husband collects fantasy books she takes a list of mine and hunts through the westerns. She quite often returns with a suitcase full of just westerns for me.
I've also visited America a few times and come back with loads too.
I find very few these days in the UK.
Steve - my daughters off to New York in a fortnight - I'll get her book hunting.
Good idea, get her to check in the phone book when she gets there and look for used book stores. That's how I did it anyway.
If you want western books to review, write the publishers for a review copy. They will be more than pleased to send you some on a regular basis...for FREE.
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