โ Scribed by Terry C. Johnston
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Jonah Hook, hero of Johnston's previous novel Carry the Wind , reappears in an atmospheric but unpleasant tale of his hard times in the years following the Civil War. Returning home to Missouri after a stint in a Yankee prison camp and service in the Indian wars out West, the former Confederate finds that his wife Gritta, their daughter Hattie and two sons have been kidnapped by raiders. He begins a seven-year quest, reminiscent of John Ford's epic film The Searchers , to find his family. Gritta has become the personal property of a renegade Mormon freebooter whose followers sexually assault her boys, Zeke and Jeremiah, before selling them to Mexican comancheros; Hattie's whereabouts are unknown. Told in a flashback from 1908, when the aged Jonah recounts his ordeal to a newspaper reporter, the narrative follows him as he recovers Hattie and one of the boys. In the final chapter, Jonah promises the journalist a sequel relating his reunion with Gritta. Johnston has a good sense of place and a fine knowledge of history, but his writing is sloppy, and he indulges in far too many scenes of graphic violence and smarmily described sex.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Prolific Johnston's (the Son of the Plains series; The Plainsmen series) vision of the West continues--grim, bleak, and unrelenting--in this sequel to Cry of the Hawk (1992). Having been reunited with his daughter, Hattie, aptly named Jonah Hook still must find his two sons and his wife, Gritta. Jonah's family had been previously abducted from their Missouri farm by Mormon brigands while he was off with Johnny Reb fighting Indians in the West as a galvanized Yankee.'' Now, after several hard years, Jonah is hot on the trail of abductor Jubilee Usher and hisAvenging Angels.'' Poor Jonah loses the scent, though, when Brigham Young disavows Usher and banishes him before Jonah arrives in Salt Lake. So, sided by Shoshone Two Sleep, he wanders down to Sonora and later north up to Texas's Llano Estacado searching for his sons, whom he learns the Comanches have taken. (This over several more years.) Meanwhile, Jonah's mentor, old-time mountain man Shadrach Sweete, is scouting for the cavalry hot in pursuit of Tall Bull's Cheyenne. Among them is Sweete's son, High-Backed Bull, who's sworn to kill his father because he detests his white half. Johnston, injecting plenty of gunsmoke and violence, real and imagined, into his work, makes the reader privy to actual battles (Adobe Wells, etc.), all the more interesting because they're depicted mainly from the Indian point-of-view--plus barroom brawls, Indian pony raids, etc. Gritta is not recovered, making way for another installment. Realistic, full-fleshed characters and action permeated with the rank smell of grease, the creak of saddle leather, the screams of the dying and wounded. No surprises lie in wait, though, for those familiar with Western history and events. -- Copyright ยฉ1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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