IRON STAR
By Loren D. Estleman
Forge Books
238 pgs
Rising western film star, Buck Jones, has convinced Boston financier Joseph Kennedy to bankroll a movie he wishes to produce and star in. The story Jones wants to tell is the last outlaw manhunt led by the legendary U.S. Marshal Irons St. John and his posse after the notorious Buckner Gang. To get the events accurate, he seeks out one of the last surviving members of that posse, retired Pinkerton agent, Emmet Rawlings; a solitary old man with only his memories to sustain him.
That’s the basic plot of Loren D. Estleman’s latest western novel, and the story goes back and forth from the early 20th Century advent of wondrous technology, ala cars and movies, to the last days of the so-called wild west. As always, Estleman wastes no time in stripping away the veneer of myth and sinks his teeth into the fat and gristle of what the post-Civil War west was: a hellish stage on which thousands of Americans moved, fought, lived, and died.
What we truly marvel at in this book is the writer’s keen sense of language. It is brutally authentic and at the same time gut-punching poetry. With each phrase, we’re catapulted back in a verbal time machine giving us a small glimpse into that world buried beneath decades of myth spinning. “Iron Star” is a delight and another gift from a master storyteller. Don’t let it slip by you.
