Winter Kill

The winter around Cheyenne Wyoming that year was devastating killing both people and livestock. John Henry Cole was three miles out of town on his small ranch waiting out the storm that was quickly killing his cattle and horses and starting to feel a little crazy himself. Everything he owned was dying before his eyes and there wasn t anything that he could do about it. His dreams of a settled life were as dead as everything else. He knew it was time to move on. And move on he did but not in a direction he expected. Teddy Green a Texas Ranger arrives in Cheyenne and seeks Cole s help in locating Ella Mims a woman who once lived in Cheyenne and with whom Cole had once been intimate. Green wants to question her concerning her involvement in a murder in Denver City. But they would not be the only ones searching for her.

*Starred Review* For John Henry Cole, the Cheyenne winter—so cold, so bone deep “that even whiskey couldn’t fight it”—has left his dream of a rancher’s settled life “as dead as everything else,” including all his cows. Cole was ready to move on anyway when Texas Ranger Teddy Green rides into town, hoping to team with Cole in tracking down Ella Mims, Green’s estranged wife and the woman Cole let get away in Frontier Justice (2012). Ella, it appears, is wanted for murder in Denver and is being tracked by a gang of vigilantes and, worse, by a psycho killer called Gypsy Davy, who likes to cut off the ears of his victims and wear them around his neck. Cole and Teddy hit the road, along with one-armed Harve Ledbettor, a friend from Cole’s drover days, tracking Ella and her pursuers from Wyoming to Texas. What transpires is as much picaresque road novel as it is classic western, with the trio encountering all manner of adventures along the trail before finally facing the inevitable shoot-out. Cameos from Bill Cody, Doc Holliday, and Roy Bean enliven the action, but it’s the interplay between Cole and his two riding buddies that makes this fine novel sing. Western fans are largely forced to survive on reprints originally pyblished decades ago, which makes the work of contemporay writers like Brooks, who haven’t abandoned the grand western tradition, all the more satisfying. --Bill Ott