Prequel to Lonesome Dove. Okay so it's a cash grap but who would begrudge him one? It's got young Gus and Call as Texas Rangers, we meet on their first mission which explodes in violence.
Some of the writing is cinematic - Gus chased along a plain as lightning flashes. A lot of it is surface, as though McMurtry wrote is without a real plan apart from "we'll follow the Santa Fe mission of 1841 and see how I go".
So he's got Call and Gus going along and every ten pages or so there's a violent encounter - torture happy Comanches (Blue Duck's dad) then Apaches, then Mexicans.
There's not a lot of character work. The main ones apart from the two leads are Matilda, a tubby hooker, the scout Bigfoot (based on a real person and killed off ealier than IRL just as Judge Roy Bean was in Streets of Laredo),and Caleb Cobb leader of the mission who I would've liked to hvae spent more time with.
I actually quite like this book but it did feel a little... lazy. And grumpy - there's so much death and torture (so it's got plenty of action) that I wondered if this was McMurtry's backlash against watching all those PC Westerns of the early 90s.
The final act felt anti climatic. Go on an expedition with a leprous lady, the Indians are about to attack... they don't.
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