Lizardskin

Checking out a reported robbery at Joe Bell's truck stop, Montana State Highway Patrolman Beau McAllister stumbles upon a shootout between Joe Bell and a band of Dakota Indians.From Publishers WeeklyWidowed and divorced, with 19 years on the Montana Highway Patrol, Sgt. Beau McAllister employs deadly wit and disarming humor to defend himself emotionally. Stroud offers a pleasure of the page similar to that afforded by Raymond Chandler as his prairie gumshoe investigates a truck-stop shootout that escalates into extortion and recreates Old West horrors whose victims are Native Americans. In a solid workingman's plot, with neither the astro-artillery of drug novels nor the corporate confusions of syndicate crime, McAllister, who buried his first wife, a Crow Indian, and is battling his second for visitation rights with their young daughter, tracks the far-reaching causes and effects of the case. Stroud, whose nonfiction bestseller Close Pursuit probed the milieu of the NYPD, authoritatively depicts police-radio cross talk, clinical crime-scene details and courtroom tricks. Comfortable on pastureland and reservation, in bars off the interstate, in the mountains and even East L.A., McAllister is a credible, quotably funny and deeply realized figure. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsStroud moves his ongoing and powerful police-paean (Sniper's Moon, 1990; Close Pursuit, 1987) from Manhattan to Montana--and rustles up a bronco of a thriller that throws him near the end of the ride. The myth of the West inspires Stroud to some bravura writing here--his pages practically exhale prairie dust--and some terrific characters, starting with Montana Highway Patrol Sgt. Beau McAllister, 45, responding to a robbery report at Joe Bell's truck stop. There, McAllister finds an Indian boy shot dead by Bell, who's now blasting away at four other Indians shooting back with bow and arrow from the shadows of Bell's huge oil tank--reason enough (to prevent a deadly explosion) for McAllister to plug Bell in the buttocks. The Indians escape and Bell threatens to sue, but that's the least of McAllister's troubles, with sleek A.D.A. Vanessa Ballard thinking of bringing him up on charges, and McAllister's shrewish ex-wife and her lawyer-lover trying to drive a dirty wedge between the cop and his young daughter. Even those problems, though, don't match the one posed by Hollywood stuntman Gabriel Picketwire, Lakota Sioux and ex-Army assassin, returning to Montana to avenge the death of the boy shot by Bell. By the time Picketwire catches up to Bell, McAllister has fought the escapees in terrifying nighttime hand-to-hand combat and killed one--prelude to Picketwire's confrontation with Bell, which sees the Indian shot and buried alive, dug up by a dog, and then stalking Bell to skin him alive. All this tremendously virile action derails, however, when McAllister ferrets out the reason for the Indians' attack on Bell--a medical conspiracy so far-fetched it might give even Robin Cook pause, and headed by a most unconvincing villain. Lop off the mixed-up final 50 pages or so, though, and you have a cops-vs.-Indians novel to rival John Sandford's Shadow Prey. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.