Corruption and Rage

When I was younger, the grocery stores we shopped at usually didn't have a nice rack of books arranged on a newsstand-like set of shelves. They were often on a standalone wire spinner and seemed rarely grouped according to category. I don't know if that was intentional -- in order to check out the kind of books you liked, you had to check out all four sides of the spinner and thus you might find yourself drawn to a new book you hadn't considered before, bringing another sale to the store. Or it could have been that the people who unpacked the books just stuck them in empty spinner slots, or browsers took them from one place but put them back somewhere else.

There usually weren't very many books on the spinners, and it seems like I remember a low turnover rate. So checking them out often meant seeing the same books several times. But that was more exciting than accompanying Mom on her grocery-buying rounds, which never included enough purchases of important items like potato chips and peanut butter and which rarely allowed for a large enough variety of cereal purchases.

I offer this little memory lane jaunt for two reasons: 1) I picked up Kyle Mills' 2009 novel Lords of Corruption from such a spinner in a little nearby Dollar General and 2) that fact is by far the most interesting thing about this story of Josh Hagarty, hired by a charity to help African farmers -- until he learns not everything about the charity is as it appears. Mills joins an unlikeable protagonist to a double-handful of plot holes and predictable situations told in a pedestrian style that you definitely would want to write home about -- in order to warn them away. He brings up several interesting and important ideas about charitable work in Africa, its potential for fraud and its cultural implications, but only to display them as set pieces, not to chew on. They fill the same role as plastic fruit -- they can be viewed, but are otherwise useless. The same, for that matter, can be said of Lords of Corruption.

-----

Sometimes you have to wonder where the marketing people who suggest book cover copy get their ideas. On the back of Day of Rage, I am told that I am reading a work by "the greatest Western writer of the 21st century." I don't know if that title belongs to William W. Johnstone, whose death in 2004 means that he did indeed publish westerns in the 21st century, or to J. A. Johnstone, who took over writing his uncle's characters after having spent many years retyping his manuscripts and helping on research. And either way, since we're just now past a dozen years into that century, calling the race for "the greatest" may be a little premature.

Day of Rage is the second entry in the "Sixkiller: U.S. Marshal" series, which have all been written by J.A. Johnstone. They relate the life of John Henry Sixkiller, a man of mixed Cherokee/European heritage who is both a tribal lawman in the tribe's Indian Territory district and a United States Deputy Marshal. In Day, John Henry is asked by his friend, a judge, to head west and help three mine owners guard their gold shipments from a clever and brutal outlaw leader. John Henry's reputation carries a lot of weight in Indian Territory and western Arkansas, but neither lawman nor outlaw knows him out west. That could be to his advantage -- or it could get him killed.

Day of Rage is a standard Western story of the quick-shooting, quick-thinking lawman facing down considerably greater odds than is best for one's health. J. A. Johnstone's style lacks the kind of polish that might bring it up a few rungs, but it's a meat-and-potatoes read that doesn't promise more than it delivers. There are plenty of possibilities in a tale of a Native American lawman in the old West, and if Johnstone doesn't take much of a look at them here, there's a chance he may do so with experience.