Noose by Eric Red

Noose

by Eric Red

2018, Pinnacle

Had high hopes for this western written by the man behind The Hitcher, Near Dark, Body Parts, and others, but too many things in a row just didn't ring true:

• Minutes after a murder, a teenager telegraphs in a bounty of $100,000 and gets it approved, about $3 million in today's money.
• The nearest law thinks it's fishy, but agrees to paying the sum as plan A and sending a posse to find the suspect for plan B.
• Noose is surrounded by a dozen men holding guns on him. He escapes by pushing them away (all twelve of them), jumping on his horse, and riding away, without getting hit, and gaining a considerable distance.
• He does the "wire across two lampposts decapitates a rider" bit with barbed wire on a ridge. No mention what the barbed wire was connected to or where Noose could have been hiding to raise the wire, how it was raised, if he was holding it how did he manage to keep his grip while the wire sliced off the bounty killers head, if the wire was held saddle high wouldn't the horse lose its head too, or how far behind was this rider from his buddies that they didn't notice until the riderless horse followed them long enough that they couldn't just turn around and see Noose rummaging through the corpse's stuff.
• Noose gets away again by sliding down an incline, the baddies watching from 150 feet away, clearly out of rifle range.
• Noose does a series of sneak attacks on foot against a group of men on horses, on the Wyoming plains, no mention how he's hiding or slipping away.

I stopped at this point. I was listening to the audiobook, thinking I must have missed something and it being too much of a pain to skip back. Checked the ebook and it flowed even worse. Everything is "big" and happens "suddenly", the two women in the book have female or lady as their first name ("female marshal" or "lady criminal"). Felt like an 11 year old wrote it and had none of the character of his films.

From Amazon