Book Review: Brings The Lightning

The Lookout, by Remington

 

Brings The Lightning by Peter Grant

Review by Barry R McCain, Oxford Mississippi.

Brings The Lighning is treat for readers of historical fiction.  The book is set in the chaotic time after the War Between the States.  The story takes the reader on a journey from Appomattox Court House, to Tennessee, and on to a trek west to the growing mining community of Denver City, in the Colorado Territory.   Walt Ames is an interesting protagonist, a former Confederate cavalry man and scout, who is trying to rebuild his life after the South’s defeat and the death and destruction that swept the land during the war.  He must overcome the consequences of being a defeated soldier and a hostile world all too ready to take advantage of him and his ilk.  Ames decides to head west as so many did in the wake of the war and make a new life for himself. 

The book is well written and moves at an agreeable pace.  Author Peter Grant shows off his wide breadth of knowledge on geography and the technology of the 1860s.  The price of flour, the cost of a box of cartridges, or a room in a St Louis hotel, etc., are details that add realism to the story and allows the reader be drawn into the 1866 world of Walt Ames.  Grant also shines in his skill as a storyteller and the characters are engaging, realistic, and sympathetic.  The reader follows Walt Ames across the plains accompanied by his woman, and two ex-slaves who are also anxious to see the West and began their lives there.

Peter Grant has several books out in different genres and Brings The Lightning is his first historical fiction set in the West of the 1800s.  It is book one of what will be ‘The Ames Archives.’   Book two in the series, Rocky Mountains Retribution, was published in May 2017. 

 

The story has many of the clichés of the Western book genre.  There is a pretty schoolmarm, hostile Indians, Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers, and brave and loyal men and women who endured all to find a new life in the West.  The ‘clichés’ are not forced or parodies, but reflect the reality of American frontier life, that while these have become clichés, we must remember they were the reality of people in that time and place.

I give this book the high rating of Five Stars.  It is good read, an interesting and fun read.  It has excellent characters.  It is well researched and historically accurate.   Peter Grant is writer with a growing following and I look forward to more from him.  Brings The Lightning is available on Amazon. 

Peter Grant was born and raised in South Africa.  He has been a soldier, worked in the IT industry, traveled throughout sub-Sahara Africa, and has worked as a pastor and prison chaplain.  He and wife live in Texas.