The Threepersons Hunt by Brian Garfield

 

Fifty yards north of the station stood the roadhouse, the Broken Arrow, set back behind its dusty parking lot. It was a big rectangle sided with brown boards; there were no windows at all. The name of the place was painted in a faded crescent across the movie-set false front and an illuminated Coors Beer sign overhung the front door. The place had a forbidding aspect, like a slaughterhouse: the grim solid walls without windows gave the impression someone was ashamed of what went on inside.

This neo-Western penned in the 1970s by the talented Mr. Garfield is set in the southwest of the 70s.

We follow a Navajo law officer by the name of Sam Watchman as he is assigned to trail an escaped Apache Convict named Threepersons.

The landscape, the heat, the inter-tribal animosity, the outside press of Anglo ostracism are all portrayed beautifully.

We ride with Watchman on his contemporary manhunt for the first half of the novel and then…and then we begin to insert politics, a convoluted conspiracy involving water-rights, infidelity, past crimes remote to us and…well, the trouble is, the manhunt and Watchman on his on are compelling as hell. These additional complications, less so.

This is a well-written briskly paced novel.

What’s good is very good.

What did not hold this reader may hold others.