BOOK BLURB:
Johnny Leach has a good life. He’s married to Elizabeth, a woman he loves, he lives in a quiet frontier town, and he owns a successful saloon. In some ways, it’s a better life than he might deserve. Still, he keeps the past firmly behind him, not because of what he’s done, but because of who lurks there ... the man he rode with for ten years ... a man a part of him still loves.

A man who rides into town one morning without warning.

Brody James is running from his own past, and his ultimate goal is South America. He claims he stopped to say goodbye to Johnny, and claims he’ll catch the four o’clock train to Galveston. But where Brody James goes, trouble follows. Before four o’clock, Johnny and Elizabeth will find their secure world falling into an uncertain future.

BOOK REVIEW:
It's pretty common for shorter menage stories to use characters' histories to get us to the action faster ~ an ex-lover comes back to town, say, which is exactly what happens here, but here it works, and it works well.

Both the situation that separated Brody and Johnny, and the small-town politics Brody walks into as soon as he comes back into Johnny's life are vivid and believable. Ditto Elizabeth's ~ Johnny's wife's ~ reaction to the situation ~ she genuinely comes across as a smart, confident, independent woman. She has her worries, her moments of fear about what she's getting into, but ultimately, this is a very balanced, very equal threesome. The author's done a great job of showing the reader what each of the three of them has to offer, has to gain, and has to loose, and the net result is a set of decisions that I could really get behind, and a poly relationship I really want to see succeed.

Fitting everything into a very tight narrative, the action of the book all takes place in just a few hours. It is an impressive feat, and makes for a very taut, well-balanced story. There's a constant awareness of time passing, which gives appropriate weight to both the character's conversations and the sex scenes, and a sense of urgency and immediacy to the action.

The wild west setting may not be 100% historically accurate, but it's imaginatively very real ~ the book itself, all those movies you half remember watching growing up, all those cultural tropes, come together to create a background that shapes this story, and makes it shine. You really get a feel of the hot, dusty, Wild West from the pages and the story is well rooted in that setting, the realities of life there.

Pepper Espinoza has written a compelling menage story, and an unusual action-packed western, which was a genuine pleasure to read.
(originally reviewed for Rainbow Reviews - http://www.rainbow-reviews.com/?p=1557) ( )