Lou Prophet is back, without a doubt one the best characters in Western fiction. Prophet stands alongside Cuno Massey, Ben Stillman, Dag Enberg, and Gideon Hawk as a leader in Peter Brandvold’s gallery of lawmen, outlaws, gunslingers, bounty hunters and womanizers. These guys are all tough, violent men and pissing them off is never recommended. Lou Prophet has been around a long time now, and I never get tired of him. I have a nice stack of the original paperbacks, the Five Star hardbacks and now this new one from Pinnacle. We get two stories here, Last Stage to Hell and Devil by the Tail. The stories are prefaced by a bit by newspaperman Heywood Wilden Scott who has tracked down the old lawman and asked him to tell some stories. We get a portrait here of Prophet in his old age, “a big, one legged man with a face like the siding of a ruined barn, at times grunting and bellowing blue curses...” Each story is an action-packed delight, full of mayhem, murder, raucous womanizing and hot lead smoking the air rather gleefully, all thanks to Brandvold’s intent to write grand Western epics that smell like gunpowder from start to finish. Brandvold is one of a kind, and his Westerns are great. None of the imitators come close to the Brandvold brand of whiskey laced gunplay, saucy women, and villains so nasty they’ll scare you from their first moment to their often agonizing last moment. I was fortunate to receive an advanced reader’s copy signed by Ole Mean Pete hisownself, and I’ll never part with it. Saddle up for an unforgettable ride to purgatory!
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