Book Review: The Thunder Riders -- Frank Leslie

Frank Leslie is the author of several "Breed" novels -- books about the half-breed loner, Yakima Henry, a likable, rough-and-tumble misfit that can't stay out of trouble with the law or from running afoul of desperadoes. The Thunder Riders falls somewhere in the middle of the Yakima Henry series, but it works as a stand-alone book (which worked well for this reader because the fact that there was a series of Yakima Henry novels would have sent this reader in search of the others to begin at the beginning -- it is simply the way I am wired). There is nothing you need to know about the earlier novels that would interfere with the storyline in The Thunder Riders, which is really how all novels in a series should be written (but, alas, are not).

I grew up reading adventure oriented fiction, from science fiction to hard-boiled mysteries to suspense novels to westerns. Reading westerns was something inherited from my father, who may be the biggest Louis L'Amour fan anywhere. He talked (and talks today) about L'Amour's Sackett series like it was (is) an addition to the Bible. And it was this love of the western genre that enticed me into reading Zane Grey, Max Brand, and, of course, Louis L'Amour by the time I was ten years old.

Having not read a western in quite some time, I got a hankerin' for a good ole shoot 'em up a few weeks back. I culled the local library and book stores, found a couple titles that looked good, and brought them home. The Thunder Riders was the third novel I started reading in the span of two hours, having thrown aside the first two in insulted aggravation (they were just so much ill-written and ill-advised published trash), hoping that I would not have to go to yet a fourth novel to get a good western story. I was hooked on The Thunder Riders by the end of Chapter One.