This entry in Ben Haas's superb Fargo series finds soldier of fortune Neal Fargo in the Pacific Northwest. As a favor to his old friend, former president Theodore Roosevelt, Fargo signs on to help a timber company get a huge shipment of logs downriver to Puget Sound. A rival company will stop at nothing, up to and including sabotage and murder, to stop that from happening. But the bad guys hadn't reckoned on Fargo.
If you want to learn something about logging in the early 20thCentury, this is the book for you. Haas obviously knew a lot about the subject and communicates it in clear, easy to understand prose. This is no dry educational tract, though, because Haas mixes in the background with plenty of action scenes, and nobody, with the possible exception of Robert E. Howard, ever wrote action btter than Ben Haas. Shootouts, epic fistfights, a desperate duel with axes, large scale gun battles, forest fires, and millions of tons of logs rampaging down a flooded river . . . well, you get the idea.
And of course I loved every bit of it. The Fargo series is one of my all-time favorites. My only quibble about it is that Haas spends a little too much time in each book filling in Fargo's background and going over the weapons he carries. But that's a very minor point. The offbeat settings and plots, the relentless pace, and the smooth, action-packed prose much more than make up for it. Great stuff, and if you haven't read any of the Fargo books, you should.
If you want to learn something about logging in the early 20thCentury, this is the book for you. Haas obviously knew a lot about the subject and communicates it in clear, easy to understand prose. This is no dry educational tract, though, because Haas mixes in the background with plenty of action scenes, and nobody, with the possible exception of Robert E. Howard, ever wrote action btter than Ben Haas. Shootouts, epic fistfights, a desperate duel with axes, large scale gun battles, forest fires, and millions of tons of logs rampaging down a flooded river . . . well, you get the idea.
And of course I loved every bit of it. The Fargo series is one of my all-time favorites. My only quibble about it is that Haas spends a little too much time in each book filling in Fargo's background and going over the weapons he carries. But that's a very minor point. The offbeat settings and plots, the relentless pace, and the smooth, action-packed prose much more than make up for it. Great stuff, and if you haven't read any of the Fargo books, you should.
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