Utah Blaine by Louis L’Amour

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is a disappointing story from writing to plotting. ‘Utah Blaine’ is described as a gunfighter and hailed as such throughout the book. So, why doesn’t L’Amour write him as one? Sure he fires his guns many times throughout the book. But, when it comes to killing he acts more like a peacenik than someone out to do away the bad guys. He’s clipping ears and intentionally missing target after target for reasons that make little sense. Unless the sense is that L’Amour had a book to get out and he decided to get lazy and prolong the story to make a word count.

Worse, because of many missed opportunities other actions follow that make the bad guy’s motivations make less sense and question the reader why this story is happening at all.

One bit of filler is near the end when the town decides to create a governing council and select a sheriff. Who do they select? A character who comes out of no where and is described as one of the bad guys gang members who is passed off in that “he looks like a good man”.

There’s also the gang of bad guys. Each claim to be murderous cretins or insane. So why are they working together? Why haven’t they bumped each other off to make it easier for one to steal the land? To me it all seems a plot device that just doesn’t work.

There is also an overlapping of events that is very poorly handled. The book I read before this was entirely of overlapping chapters. I now realize just how great a job Alex Berenson did in ‘The Night Ranger’.

The characters in general are pretty paper thin. It’s one of the few times I’ve written that about any book. Less than standard western fare. Which only adds to the silliness of the pick for sheriff and other weird character mood alterations.

The setting is also lightly touched. Nothing like other L’Amour novels.

Still another bad part of this novel is the seemingly obvious ending and the book ending just that way. L’Amour is far better than all of this.

This is one of the worst books I’ve read in the past year. This is also the first review where I thought I needed to added “spoilers”. I try to be as oblique as possible when writing these. In this case there are so many poorly handled parts of this book, that I felt I need to point out a few.

Bottom line: I don’t recommend this book. 2 out of 10 points.

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