Death Comes for the Wicked

Gary L. Stuart’s The Valles Caldera (Gleason and Wall Publishing, $14.95), the second in his Angus series following Ten Shoes Up, features the return of loner U.S. Marshal Angus Esparraza, a man more comfortable with horses than humans, but also a man who will not be stopped in the performance of his duties. The setting is mainly New Mexico in the 1880s, and Stuart does a bang-up job of describing the land, its rivers and its mixture of people—Anglo, Mexican and just plain bad hombres. Like the best of L’Amour, Stuart gives such a sense of place the reader feels transported and caught up in the history and violence that was New Mexico

—Bill Brooks, author of Winter Kill: A John Henry Cole Story