Scott Harris has become a very popular Western author in the past couple of years, best known for his series featuring Brock Clemons and the non-fiction volumes he’s edited about Western novels, movies, and TV shows. But he’s also writing a series of Western action novels about a character known only as Caz, Vigilante Hunter. (Just to be clear, he is a vigilante, he doesn’t hunt vigilantes.) In the best tradition of Western TV shows such as CHEYENNE, he’s a drifter who helps people out and hunts down bad guys who need hunting down simply because it’s the right thing to do. And he doesn’t show any mercy to those bad guys, either.
I’ve just read the first book in this series, SLAUGHTER AT BUZZARD’S GULCH, and it certainly doesn’t stint on the action. Caz takes pity on a mistreated soiled dove and winds up being targeted for death by the owner of the whorehouse and his brutal minions. Much shooting, fighting, and stabbing ensues. Harris never lets the pace slow down for very long, but when it does, it’s to put in some nice bit of characterization. Caz is enough of an anti-hero to give this book a little of the same feeling as the Edge books and other British Western series written by the Piccadilly Cowboys. In his dispensing of his own brand of justice, he also comes across like a Western Mack Bolan at times, although there’s no organization he’s fighting like Bolan took on the Mafia. He’s certainly a compelling character, and creating characters like that seems to be Harris’s strong suit.
Most traditional Western readers ought to enjoy SLAUGHTER AT BUZZARD’S GULCH. You can get it for a great price in a boxed set including the first four books in the series.
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