Midlist Writer: Book Review: Iron Heart

Friday 15 January 2016

Book Review: Iron Heart

Iron Heart

Iron Heart by Jory Sherman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short and rather routine western about a teenager whose family is slaughtered by the Arapaho. He's saved by a mountain man and sets out to take vengeance on the entire tribe. The story takes place earlier than most westerns, sometime in the 1850s I think. Colorado is still called the Jefferson Territory, which is was until 1859. The descriptions of life at the time and the vast countryside are well done as one would expect from an experienced Western author like Sherman, who has some 200 books under his belt.
Our young hero goes through various adventures, becoming a deadly killer before eventually going after the chief of the Arapaho. The finale is rather perfunctory, as if the author was on deadline, and there are too many typos in the ebook edition. There was also something strange about the Native American dialog. When they are speaking English it comes out broken in B-movie Indian style. Fair enough, my Spanish can sound like that, but sometimes they talk like that even when speaking their own language to each other! Um, no.
If you're a fan of Westerns and see this on the shelf, it's worth grabbing, but there are heaps of other Westerns out there just as good.

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