On the West Texas border a behemoth is bellowing smoke, fire and death. This monster is the infamous Abaddon Cannon Foundry, whose weapons of war have spread death and destruction around the world–and made a few men in Big Buck, Texas, incredibly rich.
Now, a Mexican-born teenager has disappeared into this fortress factory, where men work and sweat as slaves. This boy’s sister wants to learn her brother’s fate, and she just happens to know a man named Shawn O’Brien, the town tamer.
\Shawn rides to Texas to find the missing boy. What he discovers in Big Buck will spark a ferocious, bloody battle with the greatest evil the West ever known: masters of war who (laugh in the face of anyone who defies them–until Shawn O’Brien raises his six gun. Then the laughing stops.
Better Off Dead: Shawn O’Brien
William W. Johnstone & J.A. Johnstone
Pinnacle Books
Supplied by Penguin Random House New Zealand
Reviewed by Stephen Litten
Shawn O’Brien, at the behest of his brother, goes to Big Buck, Texas, to search for Manuel Cantrell, a young Mexican believed to be working at the Abaddon Cannon Foundry. Only the folks running Abaddon are none too keen on his enquiries, and Shawn is forced to live up to his sobriquet – the Town Tamer.
This is my first horse opera in a long while, and the Johnstone’s know how to write a page-turner. Shawn O’Brien is a likeable character, but he does seem to carry a number of modern attitudes. The body count is also quite high – Shawn himself kills at least six people.
Of the other major characters, Shawn’s brother Jacob, the partial love interest Maria Cantrell and the short-lived Hamp Sedley are fairly well drawn, but the villains do come across as two dimensional, with Caleb Perry, owner of the Abaddon Cannon Foundry the most cartoonish.
The basic plot revolves around Perry’s racist and deadly exploitation of his workforce, with a whiff of steampunk thrown in: cannon armed, steam driven, air frigates. Imperial and colonial powers are beating a path to Perry’s door, though why, after seeing the prototype they don’t go home to their industrialised countries and build them there I don’t know. Definitely the weak point in the plot.
As I said above, it’s a page-turner and kept me interested until the end despite the plot flaws. For those wondering why I’ve reviewed a book released six years ago, there was a minor confusion with a more recent release with the same title, Better Off Dead. If you like Westerns, this is probably up your wagon trail. For afficionados of steampunk, keep looking.
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