Review: Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry

I really don't know what I'm going to do now that I've finished my third in the Lonesome Dove series. There's only one more left!!! Luckily, McMurtry has a long backlist, but those other titles don't have Gus McCrae in them. Sigh.

If you haven't already guessed, I loved this book as much as the other two I've read. McMurtry takes us back in time to Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call's first adventures with the Texas Rangers. In this novel, the two men join up with a party of Rangers traveling from Austin to Santa Fe, to take New Mexico for the Republic of Texas. They earn the ire of Commanche war chief Buffalo Hump and his thieving second, Kicking Wolf, as well as the Mexican army. Their party of 200 dwindles to ten before they reach Santa Fe. Can they outrun Buffalo Hump's bloodthirsty lance? Will they escape from the Mexican army with their lives?

The book was full of the Wild West adventures that I loved reading about in Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. But with more evil Commanche and Apache action. This novel takes place before the white man has wiped out most of the Indian forces in the West, before areas like New Mexico and California were settled. Gus and Call were just what I would have imagined younger versions of themselves would be like. McMurty must know his characters well to have been able to write such consistent versions of them throughout their lives. Gus spoke just like the older Gus would, only with a hint of the teenager about him. It's great to see what the men were like as boys. I simply LOVED this book.

Five out of five Whatevers from me. Hopefully, Commanche Moon, the last of the four books about Gus and Call, will be as good as the first three have been. I have no reason to believe it won't!

And now I'm going to read a magazine for a bit of a break.

ETA: I bought this book with my own money, FTC. So there.