The meh Wild West. [Comanche by Brett Riley]

Like a cylinder in a six-shooter, what goes around, comes around.

In 1887 near the tiny Texas town of Comanche, a posse finally ends the murderous career of The Piney Woods Kid in a hail of bullets. Still in the grip of blood-lust, the vigilantes hack the Kid’s corpse to bits in the dead house behind the train depot. The people of Comanche rejoice. Justice has been done. A long bloody chapter in the town’s history is over.

The year is now 2016. Comanche police are stymied by a double murder at the train depot. Witnesses swear the killer was dressed like an old-time gunslinger. Rumors fly that it’s the ghost of The Piney Woods Kid, back to wreak revenge on the descendants of the vigilantes who killed him.

Help arrives in the form of a team of investigators from New Orleans. Shunned by the local community and haunted by their own pasts, they’re nonetheless determined to unravel the mystery. They follow the evidence and soon find themselves in the crosshairs of the killer.

Off the top of my head it's been a while since I've last read a novel about a killer ghost. Or for that matter a mystery thriller set in the American Southwest. The idea of a haunting in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere is in itself quite thrilling, but probably because I expect a lot of spooky lore. That's one thing I wish Brett Riley's Comanche had more of.

In this debut novel we start off with a tale of "small-town justice," maybe with some hints at the racial realities and tensions of the time. The rest of the book I expected some build-up on that, some hidden truths behind this gruesome murder. Didn't get that. Okay. Cool. So now we're in modern times and we're building our ragtag gang and we're getting way too much backstory on them, and I'm still hoping for some big supernatural tension or anti-hero type justice for our ghost, but I don't get that.

What I did get too much of was a man's grief. Our main character, Raymond, at some point has been grieving his wife for 11 years, but 11 years of gut-wrenching, can't stand to live grief. For me it just wasn't believable. It felt like every chapter from his perspective always referenced his grief. And that's weird on two fronts. The hesitancy or inability to move past his wife's death felt super exaggerated at times, but even if it wasn't, bringing me to the second point, the approach to his grief
was something to overcome, not something to learn to live with in a healthy way.

The book could have been shorter with fewer mentions of his wife. And the supernatural aspect could have been more detailed. The big boss fight felt really redundant and simple. But I enjoyed my read 3 stars from me.

Brett Riley's Comanche is due for publication tomorrow, September 01, 2020.