 "Oh
what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." |
Summer
2004 |
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| Lisa Polisar is a writer and a musician from New Mexico. Her debut thriller, Blackwater Tango, was published in hardcover in November of 2002, and her second mystery, Knee Deep, was released in December of 2003. Currently a staff writer with Crosswinds Weekly, and a fiction editor of the 12 Gauge Review, she also writes a monthly mystery-spoof article in New Mystery Reader magazine. Direct correspondence
to Lisa Polisar
or Editor.
Ms. Polisar's website is lisapolisar.com.
Cottonwood, A Review |
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Best-selling author, Scott Phillips' latest release, Cottonwood, is a traditional western - with a mysterious twist.
There are two kinds of Westerns. The lighter version, a Riders of the Purple Sage variety, is a sort of romantic suspense woven into the dusty backdrop of the Old West. These stories are as much a part of vintage Americana as The Green Lantern and the Red Ryder B.B. gun. And like other relics from this lost age, these stories come complete with rough riders, pretty young girls, and a happy ending. Then there's a darker version of Westerns, such as the world Sam Peckinpah envisioned in his groundbreaking film, The Wild Bunch.
This is the world of Scott Phillips' Cottonwood, a darker Western caught up a tangle of prairie shadows.
Bill Ogden is a self-educated merchant in Cottonwood, Kansas, a one horse town with no more than a saloon and a hitching post. But with the insurgence of the railroad and a wealthy Chicago developer, Ogden's small world is about to radically change - into one he will barely recognize. Nearly overnight, Cottonwood is transformed from small hicktown into Sodom and Gomorrah.
| The bleakness of Phillips' characters makes Cottonwood read like 1930's noir mystery fiction. But even more alarming is the authenticity of the historical details. Based on some actual history of a gang of Kansas bad boys known as The Bloody Benders, Cottonwood is a cerebral alternative to traditional Westerns that studies the origins and influences of a frontier town in 1872, and how its melange of motley transients colored a reputation it held long after these legends died. |
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Copyright 2004 by Lisa Polisar
| "Oh what a tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." |
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