AVENGING ANGEL

In this historical novel, a legendary soldier and wealthy rancher gets drawn back into the fray, recruited to help end a terrible war with Native Americans.

Josey Angel’s reputation precedes him all over the country. He is known as a Union soldier who fought in the Civil War and later battled Native Americans, earning him the moniker the “Angel of Death.” But now he goes by the name Josef Angliewicz and tries to put all that violence behind him—he’s a successful rancher in Montana with a wife, Annabelle, and a daughter, Isabelle. Still, old habits prove hard to break when he’s recruited by the Army to track down fearsome Native American Chief Crazy Horse, who is blamed for the grisly slaughter of Whites and is considered an obstacle to a peace treaty with Indian nations. Josey, in response to the economic incentives promised and out of an incurable restlessness, accepts the mission and heads out in search of Crazy Horse. But Josey is both hunter and prey—Atticus Grieve holds him responsible for the death of his father and son, who were killed fighting Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces when they marched through Georgia. Overwhelmed by grief, Atticus only finds consolation in the anticipation of Josey’s murder. Catron deftly captures the anarchic spirit that reigned in the immediate wake of the Civil War, when order strained, often tyrannically, to impose itself. In addition, he provides a sensitive portrayal of the plight of the Native Americans, capable of extraordinary cruelty but also brutalized themselves by Whites, who often saw them as subhuman. The author’s prose is the novel’s principal weakness—Catron displays a tendency to reach for melodramatic heights in the canned language of old cinematic Westerns. He seems anxious that readers won’t fully appreciate the depth of Josey’s tough-guy credentials and so repeatedly announces them to fatiguing effect. Consider this exchange between a woman inquiring about Josey and a store clerk: “ ‘There are only two kinds of people who go looking for Josey Angel. Them that need his help are the first.’ ‘And the other?’ ‘Them that want to die.’ ” Still, this is too dramatically gripping and historically intriguing a tale to be sunk by the author’s prose style.

A captivating tale about a Civil War veteran’s search for Crazy Horse.