Roundup magazine (www.westernwriters.org) – Matthew P. Mayo, August, 2010  -- The Scorpion Trail

Already a fan of Larry D. Sweazy’s first novel in his Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger series, The Rattlesnake Season, I was prepared to like its sequel, yet hesitant, too, lest Sweazy do something to sway my fondness for the well-drawn characters he’d introduced me to.  I needn’t have worried.  The Scorpion Trail is a first-class read.

And those characters?  Sweazy works them over pretty hard—emotionally, physically, socially—but the ones who survive emerge stronger and wiser.  Josiah Wolfe is a complex character decidedly not superhuman.  His tragic past and the specters of his dead wife and daughters haunt him every day, but his love for his young son, for being a Texas Ranger, and for the newly appreciations of a woman in his life bubble to the surface, forcing Wolfe for the first time in a long time to look at the future with hope.

We’re treated also in this book to the maturation of the pugnacious, trigger-happy ranger, Scrap Elliot—a welcome development, for Scrap is a firecracker whose youthful vibrancy counterbalances Wolfe’s more mature, sober ruminations.  In these characters, Sweazy is setting up a partnership, burrs and all, as filled with tension as it is with growing admiration.

At times a gunshot-speed series of events, the book takes Wolfe and Elliot from Austin to Waco to Fort Worth, along the Brazos River.  Toss in an ungrateful prostitute, angry Kiowas, skulking killers, and a vicious Mexican known as El Puno, the Fist, and you’re on—and in—The Scorpion Trail.

Sweazy has the rare and enviable ability to convey a balance of gripping action and weighty themes in a conversational manner.  The Scorpion Trail proves he’s a natural storyteller, born to the task. 

Hot off the press for splendid summer reading is the second in the Josiah Wolfe Texas Ranger Novel series. Larry D. Sweazy sets up a quest in the Greek tradition, propelling us into heart-thumping incidents amidst intensifying diversions to keep the hero from gaining the upper hand. Sweazy admits to altering historic timelines to heighten the drama, but since this is a page-turning western novel, not historical fiction, we forgive the disparity. As with the premiere book, characters are fully drawn, places are meticulously described and incidents are plausible. You’re right there with Josiah Wolfe, who starts out once again to re-join the Texas Rangers in July 1874 following the hair-raising final incidents we witness at the close of The Rattlesnake Season. He has left the remote family homestead in favor of a house in Austin, the noise-filled capital city overflowing with people in search of prosperity and Sweazy puts us into their individual and collective stories. At the center is the charge to the Texas Rangers to transform the population of Texas from its indigenous roots into a white culture. It’s not pretty, and in retrospect we wonder at what cost to defining who and what we really are as a nation, undivided, with liberty and justice for all. Take both books to the beach, or give yourself a treat during a stay-cation. Next in the series is The Badger’s Revenge, hot into Comanche territory.

A writer of more than 40 short stories, THE RATTLESNAKE SEASON is the first full-length novel from Larry D. Sweazy. It’s also the starting point to a new character in former Texas Ranger Josiah Wolfe.

At the start of the book, we find Wolfe mourning for his wife, who died giving birth to his son, and also his daughter, who died from sickness. As you can see, this is not your slam-bang Western that’s an excuse to pepper in gratuitous sex and violence. The story is based on that tried-and-true idea of bringing a prisoner to trial, which is nothing new, but what is different is how Sweazy tells it: with amazing character development throughout to keep readers engaged.

These are not the one-note characters you might expect in most Westerns, but fully drawn-out and complex personalities, with Wolfe really having to come to terms with his former life as a Texas Ranger. Add in the fact that the prisoner in question is a former associate and action pieces with enough bloodshed, and they’ll keep a Western fan wanting more.

It all builds to a climax which, for me, was a little lacking. In essence, the ending is a more of a fizzle. Still, Sweazy shows signs of some unbridled Western talent, which hopefully grows in the second book of the series, THE SCORPION TRAIL. —Bruce Grossman