FATAL ELIXIR

Like Ironside, Lobo Blacke (Written in Fire, 1995) lives for the day he can nail the man—he's convinced it was wealthy rancher Lucius Jenkins—who knocked him out of the US Marshal's office and into a wheelchair. But that day will have to wait, since there's now more pressing business. Paul Muller, whom Lobo once put away for bank robbery, has broken out of jail and is rumored to be heading toward Le Four looking for his wife and son, and for Lobo. Closer to home, medicine man Theophrastus Herkimer's made good on his boast that his wondrous concoction Ozono would turn Le Four upside-down; after swigging drafts of Ozono, 14 citizens are dead. Because one of the 14 is Sheriff Asa Harlan, Lobo's friend and ghostwriter Quinn Booker has to take over the job, just in time to confront a lynch mob and then crafty Paul Muller, whose advent is preceded by an anonymous letter promising revenge for the son who was one of the first casualties of Doc Herkimer's brew. And now that his sweetheart, Jenkins's daughter Abigail, has left the Wyoming Territory for a trip east, Quinn also has time to get his hands full of Herkimer's sidekick, the seductive Princess Farrah, who finds that stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, as long as Quinn is the arresting officer. A colorful, generously plotted slice of period Americana whose veteran author's recent death makes you wonder whether Lobo, like the figures on Keats's Grecian Urn, will spend eternity pursuing the scoundrel who crippled him.