Shavetail

Summary

Critically acclaimed author Thomas Cobb’s second novel is a “thoughtful Western” (Publishers Weekly) based on the actual events of the 1871 Camp Grant massacre. With Shavetail, Cobb delivers a masterly tale of a young man’s initiation into the brutality of conflict. When 17-year-old runaway Ned Thorne joins Captain Robert Franklin at the Camp Grant outpost, located at the edge of Arizona’s Chiricahua mountains, he enters into a world of blood and redemption. Franklin, still reeling from a failed campaign, seizes on the chance to make amends when a nearby farmhouse is raided—and a woman kidnapped—by renegade Apaches. Both Franklin and Thorne will find, however, that battle leaves scars for which there is no salve. A rich display of elegiac prose, Shavetail delivers a story both meditative and driven by a violent intensity. Narrator Tom Stechschulte channels the author’s vivid descriptions of landscape and a fully realized cast of characters.

©2008 Thomas Cobb (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC