Raider/Madmans Blade

Dane Florette goes by many names, though he always maintains the initials D.F. He is younger looking than his years. He is personable, pleasant and appears to worship the Lord. He is a serial killer. He moves from town to town in the late 1800s, meeting young women, always named Elizabeth. He gains their trust, then he uses, abuses and slaughters them. Eduard Manton has twice engaged the Pinkerton Agency to find the man who had brutally murdered his daughter, but both times his money ran out. Now he's back for a third time and he's got newspaper clippings about a couple other murdered young women who had been killed in a fashion very similar to his own child and when Raider hears his story, about how young Elizabeth had been left dead in a church like a butchered animal, he tells Allan Pinkerton he'll take the case for free. Pinkerton says he'll pay the expenses. And so Raider and Manton go off in search of the worst kind of monster, who is apparently accelerating his pace. More girls, more murders. But he's getting careless and Raider is closing in. This western really surprised me. First off, the point of view regularly switches back and forth between Raider and the killer Florette, more like a modern mystery than a western. And secondly, the story is every bit as tense as any thriller. I was simply blown away by this one. And speaking of this one, this is the second J.D. Hardin western I've read recently and it seemed so different from the first, that I decided to try and find out something about the writer and what I learned was that a long time ago Bob Gleason at Playboy Press decided to launch a series of western novels and created the Raider character, then contracted with different writers to ghost the stories. So I don't know who really wrote this story, but I know this, whoever he was, he was pretty darned good.