Apalachee Gold by Frank G. Slaughter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a lesser of Slaughter’s books. The depth of the narrative is sorely missing and the dialogue is irritating. The plot is, as usual, very tight to the historical known evidence. This being the most fascinating part of any Slaughter historical novel.

Slaughter’s characters are almost entirely based upon people noted in the journey of Cabeza and his gang across north America and, it appears, Slaughter has done a fantastic job depicting who they were, what they did and how they did it.

The narrative of this Slaughter book is very weak. In other books involving early Florida, you can almost feel the effort to cut through saw grass and palmetto, as written by Slaughter. In this book, Slaughter skims descriptions of landscape and settings and sticks to much more dialogue than usual for him.

It’s Slaughter’s dialogue in this book that disturbs me, as accurate as it may be. He well represented typical banter translated from Spanish. The Spanish language is a simplistic one. The incredible nuances of the English language just don’t exist. It appears Slaughter wrote out his dialogue, had it translated & edited in Spanish and then translated back in English to give the book further authenticity. Slaughter is usually so eloquent with the exchanges of characters. Here there’s a bluntness I don’t care for, much as I am not fan of the Spanish language. So, that I find Slaughter’s effort to be authentic to be admired and irritating as well.

All of this comes to what seems to be a quick effort by Slaughter lacking depth.

Bottom line: i don’t recommend this book. 5 out of 10 points.

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