Power of the Mountain Man by William W. Johnstone
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This entry in the Mountain Man series is, to me, a great stumble. The intent is a brash battle of many entities in a sprawling story that takes in real historical events. What is read is a non-stop predictable chase that reads more like a Matthew Riley novel. Even wonder if he was the ghost writer for this book.

Something else that happens in Riley novels happens in this book: The bad guys fold too easy. This makes a chase easier, but unrealistic. The train chase is also very Riley-ish and preposterous. This is the first Mountin man book to reach toward Science Fiction, including a number of nods to the supernatural.

The characters are standard and way below par for a Johnstone book, which I can’t recall having happened in the nearly 60 Johnstone novels I’ve read. The settings are really lacking. A good part of the book takes place in California sometime in the 1860s or so as indicated by Smoke jensen’s age mentioned. The settings are essential to understand the story/battles. Yet, the descriptions are slight and hollow. I happen to be writing this after reading the Mountain Man novel that follows this that, obviously, has a different writer that accomplishes scene writing that this writer does not.

Bottom line: i don’t recommend this book. 4 out of ten points.

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