Ride the Man Down: A John Henry Cole Story - Softcover

Brooks, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 150478779X ISBN 13: 9781504787796

Publisher: Blackstone Pub, 2018

Synopsis

In this riveting western featuring the rugged John Henry Cole, Cole receives an urgent and puzzling summons from Judge Parker to appear in court.

John Henry Cole, working as a deputy US marshal out of Judge Isaac Parker's court in Fort Smith, Arkansas, was on assignment in the Indian Nations when he was shot and seriously injured. Now, fifteen years later, employed as a deputy for Judge Roy Bean in Texas, Cole receives a personal summons from Judge Parker to appear in his court within thirty days. Cole isn't inclined to go, but he knows whatever's on Judge Parker's mind is serious and decides he has to go.

About this title

About the Author:

Bill Brooks is the author of more than twenty novels, including the critically acclaimed Stone Garden, Bonnie & Clyde, and Pretty Boy. He works as a writing instructor and has taught workshops at the Chautauqua Institution, Authors of the Flathead, Pikes Peak Writers Conference, North Carolina Literary Mountain Festival, and many others. He currently lives in northeast Indiana.

From Booklist:

The fourth in Brooks’ always entertaining John Henry Cole series finds the sometime lawman back in Arkansas, summoned by Judge Isaac Parker to track down a gang of renegades led by the ferocious Caddo Pierce. The gang is running roughshod through the Indian Nations, a forbidding wasteland where Cole was nearly killed 15 years ago. But the Nations is also home to Anna Rain, Cole’s first love, now married to a marshal, Jimmy Wild Bird. So Cole accepts the judge’s offer and returns to the Nations, hoping to rekindle something with Anna while helping her husband track Caddo and his gang. That’s what happens, more or less, but not without plenty of ambiguity on the personal front and bloodletting on the job. Among his many attributes as a western writer, Brooks describes violence unflinchingly, attentive not only to the archetypal conflict of the gun battle but also to the ugliness of its aftermath, as innards seep from dying bodies. Unlike many of his peers, Brooks is equally good with human relationships on the frontier, their inevitable transience as well as their embattled passion. Fine work in the western tradition. --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Blackstone Pub
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 150478779X
• ISBN 13: 9781504787796
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 249