Book Review: A Man Called Justice, by John Deacon
A classic Western with a six-gun full of tropes.
Self-published, 2022, 228 pages
They left me for dead, but she needed my help...
Justice is a drifter with no fear and no memory, trailed by a violent past.
Nora is a beautiful widow bravely raising her young son on an isolated New Mexican ranch. When a ruthless cattle baron pushes longhorns into the valley, Justice vows to protect Nora and her boy. But how can he succeed against thirty hired guns… including the four outlaws who left him for dead?
This is a self-published Western page-turner. It's a pretty good example of the pros and cons of self-publishing.
It's hard to find anyone writing Westerns nowadays. The genre is just not a big seller and hasn't been for decades. But a self-published author with some verve and some marketing ability can cultivate an audience among the few aficionados still hankering for tall, dark strangers, six-gun duels, range wars, and damsels in distress. So I stumbled upon this book and chewed through it quite quickly. It's a fast, and fast-paced read. It's fun and cheesy and a paint-by-numbers smorgasbord of tropes, with very simple writing that hops from character to character and spells out their motives and internal dialogs and narrates their backgrounds, usually just before they get gunned down.
The man called Justice is discovered by a pretty widow after some outlaws strung him up and left him hanging from a tree. A bolt of lightning struck him, bringing him back to life and embedding the silver star he was wearing into his chest. Yes, really. "Justice" has no memory of his past, but he is mysteriously uber-competent with all weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and riding, and is driven by an unwavering sense of right and wrong and too-good-to-be-true nobility. Naturally, he falls in love with the hot young thing who rescued him and her six-year-old son, but of course since she is a chaste and Godly woman and he doesn't know if he has a family of his own out there, they cannot consummate their love or even admit it until the end of the book.
The plot is your basic Western formula, a big honcho from Texas is trying to take over all the local ranches with bribes and threats, unleashing bad men on whoever won't sell. Justice guns his way through one opponent after another, collecting booty and bounties like an RPG character, until the final showdown. Bad guys are unambiguously bad, good guys are unwaveringly good, there are no shades of gray here. Everyone who dies either totally deserved it or must be nobly avenged for their dastardly murder. Justice is a killing machine who finds out he might be part of a secret cadre of almost supernaturally capable lawmen known as "Silent Justices," and the Big Bad he fights in this book turns out to be just a smaller boss, with a Bigger Bad to be hunted down in the next book.
A Man Called Justice is basically a Western comic book without pictures. If these are your expectations (and this appeals to you), it won't disappoint. But Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy it ain't.
My complete list of book reviews.
Self-published, 2022, 228 pages
They left me for dead, but she needed my help...
Justice is a drifter with no fear and no memory, trailed by a violent past.
Nora is a beautiful widow bravely raising her young son on an isolated New Mexican ranch. When a ruthless cattle baron pushes longhorns into the valley, Justice vows to protect Nora and her boy. But how can he succeed against thirty hired guns… including the four outlaws who left him for dead?
This is a self-published Western page-turner. It's a pretty good example of the pros and cons of self-publishing.
It's hard to find anyone writing Westerns nowadays. The genre is just not a big seller and hasn't been for decades. But a self-published author with some verve and some marketing ability can cultivate an audience among the few aficionados still hankering for tall, dark strangers, six-gun duels, range wars, and damsels in distress. So I stumbled upon this book and chewed through it quite quickly. It's a fast, and fast-paced read. It's fun and cheesy and a paint-by-numbers smorgasbord of tropes, with very simple writing that hops from character to character and spells out their motives and internal dialogs and narrates their backgrounds, usually just before they get gunned down.
The man called Justice is discovered by a pretty widow after some outlaws strung him up and left him hanging from a tree. A bolt of lightning struck him, bringing him back to life and embedding the silver star he was wearing into his chest. Yes, really. "Justice" has no memory of his past, but he is mysteriously uber-competent with all weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and riding, and is driven by an unwavering sense of right and wrong and too-good-to-be-true nobility. Naturally, he falls in love with the hot young thing who rescued him and her six-year-old son, but of course since she is a chaste and Godly woman and he doesn't know if he has a family of his own out there, they cannot consummate their love or even admit it until the end of the book.
The plot is your basic Western formula, a big honcho from Texas is trying to take over all the local ranches with bribes and threats, unleashing bad men on whoever won't sell. Justice guns his way through one opponent after another, collecting booty and bounties like an RPG character, until the final showdown. Bad guys are unambiguously bad, good guys are unwaveringly good, there are no shades of gray here. Everyone who dies either totally deserved it or must be nobly avenged for their dastardly murder. Justice is a killing machine who finds out he might be part of a secret cadre of almost supernaturally capable lawmen known as "Silent Justices," and the Big Bad he fights in this book turns out to be just a smaller boss, with a Bigger Bad to be hunted down in the next book.
A Man Called Justice is basically a Western comic book without pictures. If these are your expectations (and this appeals to you), it won't disappoint. But Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy it ain't.
My complete list of book reviews.