Fury of the Mountain Man

Doug Van Liew provides his usual range of hard-bitten characters with macho panache and the occasional pronunciation gaffe--such as "excape" for "escape." This Smoke Jenson adventure offers high action and frontier justice, as listeners would expect. But we also find Jenson distracted by encroaching middle age and thoughts of mortality, an intriguing development for this previously invulnerable hero. Unfortunately, the tale includes unnecessary elements of scatological humor and distracting sound effects, plus an overly sentimental subtext as Jenson takes a maltreated lad under his wing. In the end, Jenson's toppling of a Mexican crime tyrant is predictably bloody but provides the closure required of a good Western. D.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine