The Loner (Edge Series #1)

Josiah Hedges (soon to be known as Edge) returns from the Civil War to find his farm burned down and his brother murdered. He quickly figures out who done him wrong and spends the rest of the book cutting a bloody swathe of vengeance through the Old West. The Loner reads like a novelization of a never made spaghetti-western (not surprising since Terry Harknett, who wrote the Edge series under the name George G. Gilman also wrote the novelization of A Fistful of Dollars). Like those films, the Old West is shown as a gritty and dangerous place where violence is sudden, copious and extreme. The action is fast paced and brutal and the morals are questionable. Edge himself is a very grim character. While he generally does `the right thing' as often as not it is because it happens to also be convenient for him. He makes Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name come off as a good Samaritan. Harknett walks a very fine line here as it would be all too easy to find Edge despicable. Yet he never pushes Edge over that line. The Loner churns along with the breathless pace of an old cliffhanger serial. In fact, one fault of the book is that there may just be too many adventures jammed into its slim 140 pages. Every chapter reads as a new installment with Edge coming into a predicament which is generally resolved by chapters' end (usually the resolution involves a couple of newly created corpses). This description probably doesn't make the book sound too promising, but The Loner crackles along with very good, fast-paced writing. Reading this first book, it is easy to see why the series was so popular and still has a cult following today.

This is a well-written western with 138 pages of detailed violence, enough to make you a little outraged if you are so inclined. Upon returning from the war, Union war captain Josiah Hedges becomes "Edge" after finding his brother brutally killed and left for the buzzards on their home in Iowa. He goes after the bad guys, in the process becoming a pretty darn bad guy himself. The book incorporates just the right amount of dry, subtle humor to add levity to an otherwise violent and gory panorama. Shortly after becoming appointed acting sheriff of Peaceville, Edge guns down two teens hell-bent on payback, afterwards replying, "I think I just solved the town's juvenile crime problem." The writing is good and the plot moves quickly from one scene to another, each equally violent.

Josiah Hedges AKA Edge is a former Union Army Captain seeking revenge on the men who killed his brother. I was mildly surpried that he doesn't find them here & there around the West and kill them one at a time. Instead, the reader is taken on a journey of vengeance where Edge encounters various monsters in human form before he finally reaches the town of Peaceville and exacts his revenge. Not a traditional western, this is an ultraviolent attempt to bring Mack Bolan-style action to the genre. Taken on its own terms it's a worthy effort indeed. Not for the faint of heart.