Kirjahaku

In September 1873 they hit him over the head, knocking him senseless. They hit him from behind while he was standing in a saloon in San Francisco celebrating his fortieth birthday. John Jacob Hannon isn't a patient man, isn't forgiving, and doesn't take kindly to being forcibly dragged off to sea. He stood 6' 1" in his stocking feet, and weighed a little over two hundred pounds. Shanghaied three years, Hannon's first priority is ending his life on board, and the lives of his captors. His second is retrieving his horse and the gear he left at a small caf in Chinatown and leaving town. What he does not know is that a young nineteen-year-old Chinese girl, also running for her life will accompany him. Su Lin is far from home, her name on an assassin's list, her hired death payment for an unrightable wrong. Unwittingly, he is forced to care for her, to protect her from the men who are coming after her. The irony is that she doesn't want to be with him-"a demon white"--and he doesn't want to be saddled with "no woman." But there they are, running for their lives, together. Running, distrusting each other, trying to survive in an inhospitable land and lurching toward an unrecognizable, uncertain future, they encounter more than their share of bad luck. Gunfights, murder, abuse and intolerance rise up to meet them on their journey to Nevada and safety.

This G R Howe novel is the story of the Stocktons, a southern Montana Territory ranching family with four boys born in the wilderness in the 1850s. By need they were savagely independent, entirely self-reliant. This is a tale of their unity, their profuse disagreements, their sense of justice. It takes place in the 1880s in a land where, historically, law enforcement was what the inhabitants needed it to be and the law was what they said it was. It is a portrait of conflict between the powerful and those who did not recognize that power, as well as one woman's stoic need to survive, her demand for revenge. The issue is whether the law really protects the innocent. Should that protection ever be left to a man with a gun? Is it possible without the benefit of a jury, without the support of elected law officials, and operating outside the law, to extract justice from an immoral judgment? Ultimately, does killing justify killing?