Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter

Behind on 4 reviews. Time to get off my duff and write them up!

Was surprised that this Earl Swagger book had failed to show up on our radar, but here we go.

Sam Vincent, former county prosecutor in western Arkansas, has been retained by a Chicago firm to track down an employee of their recently deceased client; an estate matter. This missing black guy, a native of Thebes, Mississippi, stands to get a sizable sum left by his former employer. Sam, being a southerner who has fought for blacks of the early 1950s, was a logical choice. In preparation, he talks with Earl Swagger, old friend and state cop and CMH winner at Iwo Jima, about what he’s going to do and makes a deal with Earl that if he doesn’t return in a week or two, Earl is free to come looking for him.

Thebes is the home of the state prison for coloreds, where the worst of the worst are sent. No roads lead in or out. One gets there only by the river. It’s “the last stop at the end of the world, where there are no rules.” The place is run by stern warden whose dictates are acted on by the albino lead guard BigBoy and the Section Boss with his favored tommy-gun.  After a little too much snooping, Sam is tossed is arrested for a murder to await trial and a quick hanging.

But the clock has run out and Earl packs up to go looking for Sam with plans on breaking him out of this hellhole. Earl does get Sam out but gets captured himself where he becomes the only white inmate at Thebes.

Earl told Sam that if Earl gets captured to not call out the cavalry cuz it’d just sign his death warrant. Sam begrudgingly agrees leaving Earl to undergo unspeakable torture at the hand of BigBoy as well as the black inmates who hate him because he is white. And he learns of some bizarre medical experiments on the helpless inmates. It’s not just the prison. It’s also the experimentation that drives Earl’s sense of revenge.

Over a couple months, Earl develops a tenuous friendship with one of the trustees who offers Earl a dangerous way out, which he accepts.  But Earl is not one to let an injustice go unpunished and says he’s coming back. The rumor spreads amongst the inmates . . . that the pale horse is coming. 

And come back he does. Earl rounds up a group of aging gunmen, offering them one last chance at an OK Corral-style shootout in the Mississippi swamps.

We boys here at MRB are big Stephen Hunter fans and I can’t believe we’d missed this one. We have Earl with his best right vs. wrong view of the world. He detests the Jim Crow racism he witnesses, and experiences. The horror Earl experiences borders on unspeakable. And Hunter delivers on the gunfight, with vivid detail of was Earl tells Sam regarding, “what horror I am capable of imagining.” The Pale Horse Returns, brings with him ‘men of duty, with guns, . . . to bring hell to this little part of the earth”  . . . “but above all else, a man with a gun.”

Classic Hunter  - this kicked some serious ass . . . not to be missed.

ECD