Easy Pickings

Starred review from May 15, 2016
March and Kermit McPhee are working a small but potentially lucrative gold mine in 1860s Montana. Kermit is killed by a falling rock, and while March is struggling to remove her husband's body from the shaft, their cabin is set afire, killing the infant McPhee. March, her whole world destroyed in a day, heads to the nearest town, Marysville, to make arrangements for the proper burial of her son and husband. The mortician, Laidlaw, and constable, Roach, are waiting like vultures. Since March has no money (it burned), the funeral will be on credit. The constable, a brother-in-law to the mortician, quickly informs March the debt for the funeral will be called in and a lien placed against the mine. They represent the tip of a greedy and acquisitive family empire that extends all the way to Helena. March is alone and despairing. Here's where Wheeler, author of more than 50 western novels and a six-time Spur Award winner, shows his chops. A typical western author would trot out a fast gun with a murky past (Shane! Hondo!). But cliches are not in Wheeler's repertoire. March's allies are Tip Leary, a bartender with a network of Irish immigrant spies; Hermes Apollo, a lawyer of questionable ethics with a crush on March; and Rolf Wittgenstein, the local assayer. Using information supplied by her allies, March launches a one-woman guerrilla campaign against the Roach-Laidlaw crime family and engineers a very satisfying conclusion. An excellent novel from one of the genre's best.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)