Sloane: The Man With the Iron Fists by Steve Lee

Sloane: The Man With the Iron Fists  (possible original title Fastest Fist in the West)
by Steve Lee (Michel Parry with Steve Moore)
1974 Futura, 1974 Pinnacle

There are only a handful of western plots.  This one has the "boy getting vengeance for his murdered family" template.  Only the boy's parents are killed by a crime circus.  And are raped and tortured for a looooong time, like a sixth of the book.  So we're off to a good start.

Sloane is rescued by a kung fu master and spends years becoming a master himself before setting out on a path of revenge.  Nasty, brutal revenge.

I tend to like westerns that are either brutally violent or gimmicky, and this one is both.  The showdown at the end reads more like a Shaw Brothers film than a spaghetti western, and Parry manages to do a decent job with the action - writing martial arts ain't easy.

Three books were written in the series, two published, and one is available for Kindle.  Michel Parry is better know to me as an anthologist, and I wish he had written more novels.

Available for Kindle from Amazon

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