Dodge the Devil

by Joseph A. West

Book Overview

The devil wants his due. Bare-knuckle prizefighter Ben Hillman beats Dodge City's toughest rancher-but with his sister in the hands of a gunslinging hustler, he needs a thousand dollars to buy her... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451219724
• ISBN13: 9780451219725
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Signet Book
• Length: 275 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Murder stalks a cowtown

"The Devil in Dodge" might be a better title for this fifth entry in Joseph A. West's series of original GS novels, as Marshal Matt Dillon and Deputy Festus Haggen find themselves faced with a distinctly 20th-century-ish threat: a serial killer--or maybe two--is on the loose in Dodge City. From the first page, when a very young and very dead cowboy (shot in the back) is carried into town by his weary horse, the tension scarcely lets up for a minute. A roving promoter comes to Dodge with a black pugilist (a kind of team very frequently met with on the frontier) and offers a fat purse to anyone who can last five rounds with him. A self-styled "reverend" with five sons and a wagonload of seedy "wives" is also present. Then Dillon learns that the young boxer is desperate to accumulate $2000 with which to ransom a beloved sister from a gambler whose leman she has become. But when one of Reverend Shaklee's sons is killed breaking into a house, and a drummer is found dead and robbed in an alley, Matt knows more trouble is coming. The next victim is a saloon girl, found stripped, strangled, and mutilated in a stall. Is the drummer's killer branching out, or is there a second murderer on the loose? Dillon has to find out before panic seizes his town. Once again West has placed Quint Asper and Newly O'Brien in the same time period, and he describes Festus as "not wearing spurs, his mules having no liking for them" (any faithful Gunsmoke-watcher knows that one of Festus's characteristic trademarks was the pair of big-rowelled sunburst spurs that jingled a warning of his approach wherever he went). He also places Blackfoot and Cheyenne Indians in the Dodge region (Southern Cheyennes there doubtless were, but the Blackfeet were indigenous to Montana and points northward), and describes Moss Grimmick as the owner of a feed-and-tack store (he actually kept a livery barn, and indeed was out of the cast by the time Quint joined it). But at least he now realizes that Matt was a U.S. Marshal, not a town lawman, and he has written a tight, complex tale, skillfully drawing several threads together to create a good solid denoument that would suit the best Westerns around.