Jonas Hook Series by Terry C. Johnston
Jonas Hook #1
Cry of the Hawk jh-1
Terry C. Johnston
Forced to serve as a Yankee after his capture at Pea Ridge, Confederate soldier Jonah Hook returns from the war to find his Missouri farm in shambles.
From Publishers Weekly Set primarily on the high plains during the 1860s, this novel has the epic sweep of the frontier built into it. Unfortunately, Johnston (the Sons of the Plains trilogy) relies too much on a facile and overfamiliar style. Add to this the overly graphic descriptions of violence, and readers will recognize a genre that seems especially popular these days: the sensational western. The novel opens in the year 1908, with a newspaper reporter Nate Deidecker seeking out Jonah Hook, an aged scout, Indian fighter and buffalo hunter. Deidecker has been writing up firsthand accounts of the Old West and intends to add Hook's to his series. Hook readily agrees, and the narrative moves from its frame to its main canvas. Alas, Hook's story is also conveyed in the third person, thus depriving the reader of the storytelling aspect which, supposedly, Deidecker is privileged to hear. The plot concerns Hook's search for his family--abducted by a marauding band of Mormons--after he serves a tour of duty as a "galvanized" Union soldier (a captured Confederate who joined the Union Army to serve on the frontier). As we follow Hook's bloody adventures, however, the kidnapping becomes almost submerged and is only partially, and all too quickly, resolved in the end. Perhaps Johnston is planning a sequel; certainly the unsatisfying conclusion seems to point in that direction.
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Jonas Hook #2
Winter Rain jh-2
Terry C. Johnston
Jonah Hook was a man who had lost everything a man could lose--but the iron will to reclaim what had been taken from him. Now he must confront the fiery religious heretic who has enslaved his wife and the fierce Comanche tribe who has raised his long-lost sons. From Fort Laramie, land of Sioux and Cheyenne, to the empire of the Mormons in the shadow of tall mountains, and on to the Texas panhandle, where he will join the ranks of the Texas Rangers, the journey ahead will test Jonah's courage, cunning, and endurance to the limit. On this bloody trail of rescue and revenge, nothing will stop him save success . . . or death.
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