Sunset and Sawdust Book

Sunset Jones has just killed her husband. Never mind that he was raping her. Pete Jones was constable of a small sawmill settlement called Camp Rapture, where no woman refuses her husband. So everyone is angrily surprised when, thanks to the amazing understanding of her mother-in-law - who owns three-quarters of the mill - Sunset becomes the new constable and begins to investigate the murders of a woman and unborn baby in which her late husband might be implicated. Yet, no one is more surprised than Sunset when the murders lead her - through a labyrinth of greed, corruption, and unspeakable malice - not only to the conclusion of the case, but to a well of inner strength she never knew she had.

The New York Times

In language as raw and leathery as the people who make their hard living in this Depression-era company town, Lansdale lets us hear the prevailing rural wisdom about women who take care of business on their own terms. ''I don't think a woman ought to just be able to shoot a husband, she wants to,'' one man says. ''Get that started, things in ever kind of way will get turned over and sat on.'' And that goes double for the cowed black workers, who are the first to benefit from Sunset's fair-minded, if unorthodox, methods of enforcing the law in matters ranging from lynchings to land fraud. Soon Sunset has her own posse, including a wonderful dog whose abject adoration of the fiery gunslinger pretty much sums up this reader's feelings. — Marilyn Stasio