Sage Fire Reviews

Billy Kildeere

Reputation Before Reality

Reputations are built by actions. Actions taken on life's paths often change.  Billy may be a rancher today, working an honest spread ... but will his old reputation as a bank robber, overtake him before he can make good?

Synopsis: 

Billy is young, well liked by the ladies, and blazing fast with his pistols. All easy habits for the lifestyle as a bank robber.  But now, he has turned the corner, choosing instead to ranch a few head of cattle and make an honest living.  How long can it last when the local Sheriff is paid to steal the cattle from Billy?

Running with a bill of sale in his pocket, he learns fast, his reputation preceeds him everywhere he rides. People and crooked sherrifs want a piece of him without ever listening to his story.  Along the way creating a new folk tale.

Until the day fate steps in and delivers him to the town where the sheriff is his cousin, the milner is a woman he saved, and the lumber baron has a daughter Billy wants to marry.

Has Billy found a haven at last, or will it all dry up and blow away when his ill gotten family arrives to tidy up the score?

Impression: 

This is a classical western.  The type old timers would recognize by watching Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or John Wayne on the big screen.  Bad guys were really bad and good guys got the love of every man, woman and child in town.  The readers know that the hero always wears a white hat, and the villian a black one.  And even though the readers knew the hero had to suffer to get there, in the end he always got his woman.

It's fun to read a classical western style story. A reader can not put the book down, even electronically, until it is done.  It doesn't matter if the story was written in 1935 or 1995.  It gallops along with the reader, bound and tied to the saddle.

Sure, there are campy scenes in any of them, right down to the proverbial single sided blind canyon for the hero to ride the herd into town with.  Or having every woman in the story swoon over the hero as soon as he steps foot beyond the city limits.

This tale is already into multiple printings and editions. It is the stuff every library, personal or public should have on its shelf.  It will always be in demand.

RATING:  7 Campfires

Citations:

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Comparable publications:

• The Killdeere Outlaw Clan
• Killdeere Way
  

Targeted readership:

Book is marked Mature by the publisher.  Probably due to the language and violence.  Some sexual inuendo present in the later part of the book.  I give this 2 flames

2 Flames for sexual content.

Author's credentials:

Bio: Since I can remember I?ve been making up stories. As the oldest grandchild I told stories to the younger kids at family get-togethers at the old farm in Michigan, where I was born and grew up. An avid reader from about the fifth grade when I discovered the school library, I enjoy most genres. But I tend to write most in the areas where I have worked for a living. My undergraduate work was in physical chemistry, but my graduate work in Psychology. During my working life, I spent ten years as a county social worker. In that capacity I worked with people with all kinds of problems, some of which they brought on themselves, and some of which they were saddled with from having loved the wrong person. The next twenty years were in probation. There I worked with essentially the same people?the ones who hadn?t dealt with their problems before the got crosswise of the law. In that arena also, I spent much time counseling the wives, husbands (occasionally) and children, and parents (often) of those who had messed up. In too many cases the reason was substance abuse / dependency. So I wrote about those people in Send an Angel (Author house, 2002) who have that problem, love the person who has that problem, or were victimized by those with an addiction. Because all of us are romantics, whether or not we admit it, I have to put a little romance into my stories. My love of western lore produced Billy Killdeere in 1995. It sold out, but the company went under before we could reprint. Killdeere Way, the sequel is in your hand. Colorado Justice is in the editing stage; the latter two are with Treble Heart Books. Fireball, a suspense-thriller is currently with a book doctor. After Kat Martin read Billy Killdeere, and reviewed Angel, she insisted I must write romantic fiction, that she knew no male writers, and few female writers who wrote love scenes as sensuously as I do. Treble Heart Books has two of those under consideration. I?m married to the former Phyllis Sharp. We have a son, Larry, and a daughter Lacey, from my previous marriage, and a daughter Pam, and son, Matthew, from her previous marriage. There are two grandsons and a great-grandson as well?so far.

Reviewer & reviewer credentials:

MD Johnson is a mountain northwest regional -- freelance author, living in Payette, Idaho.

His writing interests include poetry, romance, westerns, science fiction, travel, and history. His work has appeared in a diverse range of publications including True Romance and Ballyhoo Stories.

In 2007 he bacme an EPIC author and he has republished the 1935 western classic historical novel, “The Bitterroot Trail” as the anthologist. http://thebitterroottrail.pencraft.biz 

Mr. Johnson also runs a book review web site, Sage Fire Reviews, http://sagefire.pencraft.biz . Mr Johnson specializes in small press editions which include multi-format e-books in the genres above. In early 2008, Mr. Johnson was nominated and accepted membership into the National Book Critics Circle.

If you have a book or an ARC, you would like Mr. Johnson to review, please address your questions to him at queries@pencraft.biz.

All work © 2008, MD Johnson, all rights reserved.