This was my fifth Elmore Leonard western, and a bit of a letdown compared to the others. Although it was a good, enjoyable story, I found it a bit choppy with its time structure and switches in point of view. Great characters and the usual superb dialogue. I liked the ending, even though it felt too abrupt, and didn’t have enough meat to it. Still, if you like westerns, it will do you fine.
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Brendan Early and Dana Moon have tracked renegade Apaches together and gunned down scalp hunters to become Arizona legends. But now they face each other from opposite sides of what newspapers are calling The Rincon Mountain War. Brendan and a gang of mining company gun thugs are dead set on running Dana and "the People of the Mountain" from their land. The characters are unforgettable, the plot packed with action and gunfights from beginning to end

In this novel, Harper's Weekly in 1888, hired C.S. Fry, the famous western photographer to cover a land war that was close to breaking out near Sweetmary, AZ. Two of the men mentioned in the article with accompanying photos were Brendon Early and Dana Moon, friends who now found themselves on opposite sides of the fight for the land the mining company wanted for copper exploration. The escapes they get involved in including a trip into Mexico to catch an Apache fleeing his reservation are exciting for the reader. On that trip, they made an enemy of Sundeen, a truly real bad guy who ends up involved in the land war on the side of the mining company. There is constant action leading up to the final battle. The Apaches in the story are treated positively as are the women. ( )