All because of a single dark thought by the patriarch of the Anderwald family after the soldier’s repeated threats, this original sin reverberates and returns through the years. It heaps tragedy on these beleaguered pioneers as they slowly build a hard-scrabble life marked by violent death, madness and the other-worldly battle between the soldier’s evil shade and the protective spirit of the matriarch, who died of grief after her young daughter falls into a nest of cottonmouths hidden near the banks of the Medina River.

This isn’t a book that serves up graphic scenes of supernatural gore or alien predators. It isn’t even a tale told in the style of a Stephen King. Instead, this book echoes the everyday horrors of Southern Gothic masters such as Flannery O’Connor. There may be an evil duch who announces his presence with the stench of the grave, but the carnage and killing is delivered by the hand of man.

The author takes her time, slowly building the suspense with an Old Testament sense of inevitable damnation while masterfully pulling from the rich and bloody history of Texas and its immigrant settlers, fleeing the conflicts of Europe and drawn by the false promise of a new land at the dawn of the Civil War.

There is also the strong echo of the deep cultural divide that has long bedeviled America, the pernicious belief that one man’s ignorance and wrong-headed beliefs are just as worthy as another man’s knowledge and talent. This idiocy is at the root of the animus between the soldier and the Anderwald patriarch. Time and again before the Comanches kill and mutilate him, the soldier rails at Marcin Anderwald: “You’re no better than me.” Or words to that effect.

And in an understated way, the author also shows the prejudice and racism of the times, applied equally to blacks, Mexicans, immigrants who happen to be Catholic and, in a nice twist, two Arab wranglers who came to America as part of the failed military experiment with the use of camels in the deserts of Texas and the Southwest.

But above all, this is a story of resilience and perseverance. It’s a realistic portrayal of the American story — the truth, not the myth, solidly rooted in the history of a place. In this case, Peacock Bend on the Medina River. Near Bandera, Texas.

Good story. Good stuff.

— Jim Nesbitt, author of the award-winning Ed Earl Burch hard-boiled Texas crime thrillers.