Vengeance Moon

Every now and again, I read a book and at the end, I find myself wondering why the author made certain choices about the story. Quite often, I consider story structure or a particular depiction of a character and question why those things were done in a given way. This was one of those books. Charles G. West was written nineteen Westerns, or at least there are nineteen depicted so far on his website. It wasn't until I finished reading this book and began looking for additional information that I figured out why those questions - which I'll get to in a moment - occurred to me. Contrary to the cover copy on the back, which (not unusually) makes this sound like a fairly typical Western story of a man unfairly accused of murder seeking to make a new life for himself, this book is much more an examination of the villain - P.D. Wildmoon and her three sons. P.D. is a bounty huntress hired to track down the protagonist, Matt Slaughter, who is on the run for a murder he didn't commit. He's now living with the old tracker, Zeb, and his love interest, Molly, high in the mountains. The writing quality itself is very solid, if a bit bland at times, and the story is engaging enough to keep the pages turning, but where the readers interest is truly drawn is to P.D. and her evil brood, rather than the hero. A female bounty hunter - so weathered and hard-living that she's often mistaken for a man - P.D. has few redeeming qualities. Her sons even fewer. But like a slow-motion car accident, the reader can't help but be fascinated by the blood trail they leave everywhere they go. And the often very bad decisions they make in their hunt for the hero. Now, getting back to those questions. I finished the book and realized that I knew far more about P.D. than I did Matt Slaughter. Her motives, mostly greed and revenge, were easy to understand. Why, I asked myself, did the author write this book like that? Why didn't I know more about Matt? Why were the villains more interesting to me than the hero? Then I did my research and got my answer. This isn't the first Matt Slaughter book. It's the third! Why the publisher didn't bother to indicate that anywhere on the cover or inside the book itself is a question that I might be able to answer, but no matter the answer, it still does a disservice to the potential reader - and the reviewer. I suspect if I'd read the other two, I might have enjoyed this one more. Alternately, if Mr. West had included more in-depth background on Matt Slaughter, I might have felt his motivations and values more deeply. As it was, I kept wondering why a man on the run would go so far out of his way to engage in contact with others from the civilized world, when he was a wanted man, living in the middle of nowhere precisely to avoid such contact. There were a couple of minor gripes I had. First, it appeared that quite a few of the characters were riding stallions. Contrary to the romantic image this presents, mostly it would be a pain in the ba