The Madstone

September 1, 2023
A spirited tale of the Old West, with outlaws, jewels, and a few good guys. Crook brings back the likable narrator of her last novel, The Which Way Tree (2018). It's two years later, around 1868, and 19-year-old Ben Shreve is working as a carpenter in Comfort, Texas, north of San Antonio. He's still wondering about his half sister, Sam, who took off in the previous book to hunt down the panther that scarred her and killed her mother. Through an outhouse misunderstanding, Ben winds up sharing his wagon with a treasure hunter named Dickie Bell who has found some unusual jewelry and needs a lift to the gulf town of Indianola. They pick up a man whose horse was stolen by highway robbers, "imposter Indians...dressed up like chiefs," and who refuses to tell them his name. Down the road a piece, the stranger is shot to death by a young pregnant woman whose stagecoach was being attacked by the same imposters who hijacked the unnamed man, who were then interrupted by a different group of bandits. Nell and her 4-year-old son, Tot, continue with Ben and Dickie. Why she shot the man has to do with marital discord and a vicious outlaw taken from Texas history named Cullen Baker, a.k.a. the Swamp Fox, some of whose men are pursuing Tot. Other perils include a rabid coyote and a rattlesnake. Certain threats may lose their sting because some survivors are obvious, given that the story is told in the form of a long letter from Ben to Tot. As in the last novel, Crook notes Ben's knowledge of Moby-Dick, but the guiding spirit here feels more like Dickens than Melville. Crook has a gift for engaging details, such as the simple comfort, to a young carpenter raised poor, of a room with a bed and chair and "a nicely carved chest of drawers, with a washbowl atop it, and a small rug alongside the bed." An entertaining, well-paced yarn, and a sequel that suggests another installment.

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September 18, 2023
Crook (The Which Way Tree) sets her underwhelming epistolary novel in 1868 Texas, where a young man gets in over his head after lending help to a group of strangers. The ordinary life of Benjamin Shreve, a Texas woodworker, is upended after he encounters a pregnant woman named Nell and her four-year-old son, Tot, on the run from her missing husband’s brothers, a rageful bunch known as the Swamp Fox gang. (They claim Nell murdered her husband, while she maintains he abandoned her in poverty after the Civil War.) Crook’s narrative is framed as a letter from Benjamin to Tot, recounting the treacherous journey Benjamin takes to escort mother and son to safety along with their fellow stagecoach passenger, Dickie. As the unlikely comrades attempt to reach the Louisiana border, Dickie claims to have unearthed a cursed necklace that may carry misfortune to whoever possesses it, and Benjamin falls in love with Nell. While this has the exciting and fast-paced plot of a serviceable western, there’s nothing special in Benjamin’s voice. “Reckoning offers more peace to the heart, as it has an end,” he claims in his letter, but his curious lack of intimacy and distance from the story’s tense events leave little evidence of such a reckoning on the page. Readers will have a tough time seeing this one through to the end. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary.

October 1, 2023
Crook's (The Which Way Tree, 2018) sixth novel is told in letters written by Benjamin Shreve, a nineteen-year-old carpenter living in Comfort, Texas, to another character for review on his nineteenth birthday years in the future. Written in Shreve's phonetic, Hill Country drawl, the book follows a Texas map southeast from Comfort, where Shreve agrees to transport Dickie Bell to a distant stagecoach station to catch a steamer to New Orleans. The duo later take on Nell, a pregnant woman, and her young son, Henry (also known as Small Tot and the future recipient of the letters), who are trying to outrun Nell's husband. After a mangy coyote bites Small Tot, the group grows to include Horhay Elveraz, a self-described Negro Seminoll who saves the boy with his madstone. Though the success of the group's venture is never in doubt, Crook finishes the novel with the only blow that could force Shreve's emotional growth. Given the setting, the journey, and the implied romance, this epistolary novel will appeal to western and historical-fiction readers alike (particularly Lone Star aficionados).

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