Flint
1960
- fiction
- western
- women ranchers
- fiction, westerns
- western stories
The story
He left the West at the age of seventeen, leaving behind a rootless past and a bloody trail of violence. In the East he became one of the wealthiest financiers in America--and one of the most feared and hated.Now, suffering from incurable cancer, he has come back to New Mexico to die alone. But when an all-out range war erupts, Flint chooses to help Nancy Kerrigan, a local rancher. A cold-eyed speculator is setting up the land swindle of a lifetime, and Buckdun, a notorious assassin, is there to back his play.Flint alone can help Nancy save her ranch...with his cash, his connections--and his gun. He still has his legendary will to fight. All he needs is time, and that's fast running out....From the Paperback edition.
What it’s like
Lean, sun-bleached Western prose with the dry, unhurried texture of a frontier story told in plain declarative sentences: wide New Mexico ranchland under hard noon sun, dust on boots, the long shadows of late afternoon across grassland and adobe. The mood is a blend of weary melancholy and rising tension, the kind of book that suits a lazy weekend afternoon, a long train ride, or a quiet evening with a glass of whiskey. Action arrives in short, sharp bursts, with gunfire and a few brutal confrontations that land quickly and then give way to long stretches of conversation, horseback travel and sparse landscape description. Violence is present and occasionally bloody, though not gratuitously graphic; the menace comes mostly from the threat of an assassin hanging over the story. Romance is restrained, a slow and guarded warmth between two proud people. The arc follows a dying, hardened man who reluctantly lets his past and his purse work for someone else, and it carries a wistful sense of late reckoning. Recommended for readers who love classic Western voices, old-fashioned moral codes, and stoic protagonists, and less suited to anyone seeking something gentle or free of gunplay.
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