Creed of the Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What a disaster. How did this one get past Johnstone, who was still alive when this one was published? This racks up all the worst a book can conjure: Very poor writing, poor plotting, vast inconsistency, poor history, bad characters, scant settings and that’s enough.

I have no idea who wrote this book, but can maybe, possibly forgive if there were a dozen people involved, in different countries writing in different languages. How on earth did Johnstone let his foundation character get this mangled? Smoke Jensen goes from confident farmer, to child sounding lost soul to bloody killer to lion of the law. Worse there are flashbacks where parts of other books are lifted making this all even more apparent.

As I’ve been mostly reading the Mountain Man series in order I’ve found the last few to have flashbacks with parts of other books included. I put up with it once. then twice and now after more lazy acts like this, I strike this book down. This is the worse of the others in that much larger chunks of other books are used. This is a lousy way to cheat the reader.

The plot is a mess. There is a good idea at the hear t of it all, but it’s all old territory traveled more than Preacher has traveled the mountains. There are all kinds of problems to point out, including all of the lifted material. Let me focus on one obvious detail. Jensen is a witness to a crime. He knows he and another mountain man are the only witnesses. Jensen then chases down those who did the crime and goes WAY out of his way to bring them to trial and threatens everyone if the verdict isn’t against the bad guys.

So, what does, always written as smart & clever, Smoke Jensen do. He leaves. Thus undermining the very trial he fought for. Thus, the bad guys have to be freed with no evidence and that places Jensen tracking them down to just threaten them again. So what next happens? The book is ended with zero resolution to the threats. The book ends with some sappy silliness with Jensen’s wife, who, in this book, is a nymphomaniac.

Of the 75+ Johnstone books I’ve read, this is one of about three I’ve panned so hard. The others are just written poorly and not of the western genre.

Bottom line: i don’t recommend this book. 1 out of 10 points.

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