Custer’s Brother’s Horse, by Edwin Shrake, $24.95. Author Edwin Shrake, with movie credits that include “Tom Horn,” may well have another screenplay in the offing with his new novel, “Custer’s Brother’s Horse.”
Scene 1 opens in Austin, Texas, in a military prison at the end of the Civil War. Chaos reigns beyond its walls. The elected governor has fled to Mexico, and returning rebel soldiers snatch what they can.
Inside the prison walls, Capt. Jerod Robin, charged with stealing Lt. Tom Custer’s famed horse, Athena, is chained to the gallows platform. Beside him is an Englishman, Edmund Varney, a writer and veteran of dangers in Afghanistan, who had sailed to New York in hopes of interesting publishers in his most recent book.
Their jailers, the infamous Leatherwood brothers, march the two prisoners to an old foundry building serving as a courthouse. A crowd gathers. The circuit judge settles in. Seated on the bench with Varney and Robin are Flora Bowrie, a 15-year-old mulatto girl from New Orleans, who wants payment for the theft of her wagon, and Lt. Custer, younger brother of the famed general, who is charged with breaking into a jewelry store and killing its owner.
The judge soon grows impatient and orders that Varney, Robin, Custer and the girl be put into a wagon and taken across the county line where they will be someone else’s problem. Enter Isabella Maria de Alvarado Bushkin.
A graduate of the University of Madrid and conversant in four languages, Isabella had made the mistake of marrying a card player from New York. In the beginning, they were wined and dined by society elite. Even when the creditors closed in, forcing them to escape to Texas, Bushkin magically managed to become a senator. Now that the war is over, her husband’s fortunes are on the wane. Yet Isabella remains undaunted.
She joins the four. With the magnificent horse Athena never far from the center of the scene, the story builds to a four-star, “High Noon” ending.
A thoroughly entertaining tale that uses history to its full advantage.
The Desert Remains, by Charles C. Poling, $24.95. Set on Rancho de Las Animas, a vast historic ranch, “The Desert Remains” opens with the funeral of Rae McCullough, its owner.
Daniel Stewart, a former ranch hand, has returned, ostensibly to pay his respects. Yet it’s more the place and Ruby, Rae McCullough’s daughter, who still haunts his life, that draw Daniel there. As the six pallbearers lift the casket, they are surprised by how light it is. They don’t know the body has been taken into the mesas somewhere to be buried Indian style.
As Daniel and Ruby reconnect, all his feelings for her resurface, “a whirlpool tugging at him.” They ride up into the hills as they have done so often. And she shares her fears that though she is going to inherit the ranch, if her father finds the journals her mother kept, he will use them against her.
The story moves back and forth in time, revealing the relationships among the people who have always worked on the ranch and adding to the complexity of David and Ruby’s relationship.
Ultimately, the novel is a love story developed primarily through the backstory that continually weaves through the book. Yet it as much a love story about place as it is about the uneven love between David and Ruby. While the author occasionally slips in overly dramatic passages written in a pseudo-literary style, his obvious understanding and respect for the dramatic scenery and rich history of the Southwest are enough to save the day.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a regular column on new regional fiction.
