Texas Vigilante by Bill Crider
Texas Vigilante: An Ellie Taine Thriller by Bill Crider is the sequel to Outrage at Blanco. I had not read the previous novel but this one can stand alone. I gave it five stars even though I don't read a lot of westerns.
I was surprised by the cover photo with a woman wearing modern sunglasses since this book was set in the 1880's.
Ellie Taine had been left for dead after the men raped her & killed her husband. She was relentless in hunting them down. She then put her guns away to run a ranch.
A ruthless killer, Angel Ware, escaped from a prison wagon on the way to Huntsville, Texas. He tracked his sister Sue to Ellie's ranch & attacked & took Sue's child with them. Ellie couldn't stand for waiting for the posse so she mounted up & headed after them.
Sue went with her & questioned whether they should have waited for the Marshall. Here is a quote that tells a lot about the type of woman Ellie is: "If you got hurt, what did it matter, as long as you were doing the right thing? And she knew they were doing the right thing."
One of the escaped convicts, Jephson, questioned whether he was doing the right thing. "He even wished, briefly, that he'd done things differently, that he'd done something to help Hob Bowman. But there was nothing he could have done. He'd been chained to Angel then, & he was chained to him now. The chains were different, & you couldn't even see them, but they were there just the same."
One of the members of the posse said "'But it's mighty wet out there.' The other replied: 'Better to be a little wet than a whole lot dead.'"
In the encounter with Ellie, "Angel was taken completely by surprise. He'd never met up with a woman like this one before, a woman who'd just start shooting at you without a word of warning. It was just the kind of thing he would have done." He would have too, but didn't think it was right that a woman would.
I received a free kindle copy from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review but that did not influence my opinion of this fast moving book.
