Review: Doomsday Mesa - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

DOOMSDAY MESA was published originally by Robert Hale in 1995, making it one of the earliest Chap O’Keefe novels I’ve read. It’s available now in new e-book and paperback editions from Amazon. That’s a great title, and being a long-time fan of the work of Keith Chapman, the veteran writer/editor behind the O’Keefe pseudonym, I was looking forward to this one. It’s safe to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

Chapman spends a little time giving us the back-story of his protagonist Yale Cannon, who, as a young man of somewhat shady character with a reputation as a gunman, joins a wagon train heading west in the days before the Civil War. There’s a budding romance between Cannon and a young woman whose family is traveling with the wagon train, but unfortunate circumstances arise to split them up.

The story then moves ahead a couple of decades to a time when Yale Cannon, a decorated war hero and veteran Deputy U.S. Marshal, arrives in the town of Antelope, Colorado, to pick up a captured outlaw from the jail and take him back to Arizona to face charges there. Of course, things don’t work out that easily. There’s a war brewing between the local ranchers and a religious cult that’s been established on a nearby mesa where there used to be a gold mine. The ranchers believe the followers of the charismatic cult leader are rustling their stock, and they’re prepared to go to any lengths to put a stop to it, including breaking out the owlhoot Cannon’s supposed to pick up and hiring him to run off the settlers on the mesa.

That’s enough for a book right there, but Chapman packs several more plot twists into his book, including a connection to Yale Cannon’s tragic past. He weaves all these strands together until they finally result in an explosive climax and one final, very effective twist.

DOOMSDAY MESA is an excellent traditional Western novel with plenty of action and the interesting, slightly offbeat characters you’ll always find in a Chap O’Keefe novel. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and give it a solid recommendation for Western fans.