A Town Called Vengeance

This sparse sequel to Brokeheart is full of cinematically bleak Wild West desert ambience, and it boasts plenty of outlaws and gory, fly-attracting corpses, but the motivations of Wolf’s supporting characters are highly stereotyped, and the supernatural aspects fail to achieve eerieness. Newspaperman Kepler and his sweetheart, June, flee Colorado for Vengeance, Ariz. They’re following the story of a pack of murderous Apache warriors led by a she-wolf; Kepler suspects this is the werewolf Landry, whom he has previously encountered. But wolf attacks and a newly made enemy put the couple back on the road, and when June is kidnapped, Kepler’s top priority becomes surviving long enough to rescue her. The multibook arc of Kepler and Landry’s relationship makes scant progress as Wolf extends the chase into the next installment. Wolf treats the black Buffalo Soldiers as a barely differentiated group, mostly using them to give Kepler credit for not being bigoted; the Apache werewolves are entirely generic and it’s never clear why they follow Landry, a foreign woman. These portrayals and attitudes are directly descended from pulp stories about the Wild West, and from a modern perspective they feel racist. There’s little to recommend this unsatisfying middle volume. [em](May) [/em]