While I appreciate and enjoy the full-length novels by this author, in my opinion where he excelled was in the realm of short story writing. This collection contains many of his better tales, including those about Texas Ranger, Chick Bowdrie. If you're new to L'Amour's works, checking out this collection might be a good way to familiarize yourself with his brand of storytelling. ( )

While I appreciate and enjoy the full-length novels by this author, in my opinion where he excelled was in the realm of short story writing. This collection contains many of his better tales, including those about Texas Ranger, Chick Bowdrie. If you're new to L'Amour's works, checking out this collection might be a good way to familiarize yourself with his brand of storytelling. ( )

From Booklist L'Amour published 90 novels, 27 short story collections, a memoir, 2 nonfiction books, and even a volume of poetry. He is the only novelist to win both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. This is the second volume of his western stories to be released posthumously. The 30 tales collected here reflect the qualities on which L'Amour's timeless popularity is based: memorable protagonists, excellent plots, moral clarity, and plenty of action. About half of these tales feature Chick Bowdrie, a tough-as-nails Texas Ranger with a Holmesian ability to analyze a crime scene. Bowdrie solves a 20-year-old kidnapping, ends a nascent range war, and brings to justice the killers of 14 outlaws slaughtered in an ambush, among other heroics. Beyond the Bowdrie offerings, the standout tale in the collection may be "Law of the Desert Born," in which Shad Marone, on the run for a crime he didn't commit, draws his pursuers into a trap in which only one man will survive. Great reading from a genre master. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review "L'Amour never writes with less than a saddle creak in his sentences and more often with a desert heatwave boiling up from a sunbaked paragraph. A master storyteller.... for reading under the stars."—_Kirkus Reviews_ ( )