Wolf Moon

Ed Gorman here: 


Of my westerns, Wolf Moon seems to get the most response from readers. I suspect this is so because Wolf Moon is a hardboiled crime novel set in the 1800s. I hope you'll give it a try along with all the other great books on Top Suspense Group. Wold Moon in e book form can be yours for $2.99.

Here's a recent review from Pulp Serenade:

"Wolf Moon" by Ed Gorman (Gold Medal, 1993)

I’m a big fan of Ed Gorman’s work, but the opening prelude to Wolf Moon still caught me off guard and left me excitedly wondering what more twists lay just around the corner? Many more, I was pleased to discover. The story is as noir as they come, with a bleak and blistering finale you won’t soon forget. Originally published by Gold Medal in 1993, Wolf Moon is now available for the Kindle via Top Suspense Group.

The novel opens with the story of a wolf cub who was captured, and whose family was murdered, by a man named Schroeder. Gorman then shifts to the story of Chase, who was set-up and sent to prison because of this same Schroeder. When he gets out of jail, he has the chance to reunite with the love of his life, Annie, and start a new life as a police officer – but Chase’s thirst for vengeance threatens to ruin everything.

With its dual story of man and animal, Wolf Moon sometimes has the quality of a fable. It’s an original and innovative spin on the Western revenge novel, and Gorman isn’t afraid to risk taking new paths or going to dark places with this one. The parallel stories of entrapment highlight not only a festering need for vengeance that consumes one’s identity, but also how the loss of one’s family can ignite and exacerbate that all-consuming passion for destruction. Family is an important topic in Gorman’s work, a constant and necessary reminder of humanity, and without that reminder a character drifts away into oblivion. Family offers his characters a moral grounding, a reaffirming sense of the self, and absolution for their actions, whatever they may be.

A reoccurring motif in Gorman’s books is that there no crime is worse than hurting one’s own family, or their loved ones. That single act of betrayal, whether deliberate or accidental, seems to be the most devastating of all. These sorts of stories reappear throughout Gorman’s work, sometimes as the central plot (as in Wolf Moon), and other times as an aside about a minor character. Chandler famously wrote that Hammett “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Gorman seems to follow in this trajectory, but he takes it in his own direction: he gives back a conscience to crimes committed, a lingering sense of regret that never goes away, and a moral weight that wears away at ones soul.

Wolf Moon is an excellent Western novel thick with noir and suspense overtones. Fans of Gorman’s crime novels shouldn’t miss this one. Wolf Moon is now available for the Kindle via Top Suspense Group.