cover image Cottonwood Station

Cottonwood Station

Michael Zimmer. Walker & Company, $19.95 (183pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-1273-8

When wandering frontiersman Clint Dawson comes to the aid of a stagecoach assaulted by Cheyenne Indians on the Kansas plains, he enmeshes himself in a web of treachery and outlawry that will require the rest of this absorbing narrative to untangle. After routing the war party, Clint joins the stagecoach occupants in a desperate flight to Cottonwood Station, a well-fortified building that should provide security if the Cheyenne attack again--which they certainly will, since they are tracking one of the white travelers, who betrayed them into the hands of Custer's Seventh Cavalry at the Washita Massacre. To add to the group's troubles, deadly outlaw Rusty Cantrell and his gang are also headed for the station, fleeing in the aftermath of a botched bank robbery. In this sophisticated variation on Ernest Haycox's ``Stage to Lordsburg'' (itself a reworking of Guy de Maupassant's ``Boule de Suif''), Zimmer holds the reader's attention by shifting the storytelling among Dawson's group, the Indians and the Cantrell gang. He displays a fine eye for period detail, flawlessly evoking a particular time and place, as he did in Sundown and Dust and Glory . This new novel confirms his place as an important writer in the western genre. (Aug.)