This book is a sequel to Hey, Cowboy, Want To Get Lucky?, and the joke’s on me. When I bought this book in 2015, I bought them both. And they quite likely might have been together on the hallway to-read shelves until we had to move those bookshelves into my office. So they were not together when I picked this book up during the month or so my to-read bookshelves have been (mostly) in my office, or I would have looked closer and picked up the first one first. Ooops.
At any rate, this is a modern(ish) cowboy book, a modern Western. Lick and Al tend cattle in Idaho/Nevada, making a lonely living in a small trailer miles from anyone else. One day, while they’re out on the range, they spot someone walking–it’s an attractive woman who has just emerged from a small plane crash. It turns out that she has taken $500,000 from the man she’d been living with, to whom she pretended to be married to appease his wealthy parents and to hide from a possible drug trafficking charge in her past. Her “husband,” who runs a casino, has partnered with a Las Vegas animal trainer who runs an exotic animal sanctuary to allow the richest of the rich to hunt endangered species at the sanctuary–and the $500,000 represents the deposits the “husband” has gotten from participants, part of which is owed to the partner. So he sends henchmen to find his “wife” and bring her–and the money–back.
That’s the plot. It’s a bit of a chase as the bad guys find where the woman is, and the cowboys have to get her to safety, and then when she’s safe (spoiler: she’s not safe for long), the goal becomes to stop the hunt from taking place or to minimize the damage. Which they might (they do) with the help of a posse of retired rodeo riders.
So it’s an amusing book. Better than The Adventures of Slim & Howdy which probably falls into the same modern genre of comic contemporary cowboy stories.
I enjoyed Black’s columns in the Republic Monitor back in the day (it being the first of my adopted hometown newspapers). I enjoyed Croutons on a Cow Pie, a collection of verse and silliness, when I read it in 2019. And I’ll probably enjoy the book that precedes this one when I get around to it.
