Dead Man's Hand
Book One of the Assassin Series

by Tim Lebbon
Necessary Evil Press
$12.95 (signed softcover), $150 (traycased)

I'm a sucker for cursed, immortal characters. I loved television's Forever Knight and Highlander because their protagonists were forced to move through their lives at a much slower pace than humans. In our favorite literature, there are characters such as Yarbro's Sainte-Germain, fated to live through human eras we can only experience by way of history books. King Arthur and his knights have been transported through eras as well. I confess that Tim Lebbon's engaging new series of short novels, of which Dead Man's Hand is the first, reminds me of Barry Sadler's '70s-era male pulp adventures of Casca, the Eternal Mercenary. Who knows, maybe Tim and I grew up reading the same stuff.

In Dead Man's Hand we meet a killer named Temple. But is he more than a killer? Is he, in fact, a demon—as maintained by Gabriel, the man cursed to hunt Temple despite the pain it brings him? The town of Deadwood has seen its share of gunfighters and glory hounds, prospectors and conmen, and now it may have seen its first supernatural beings. This is the Deadwood of Western legend, the death place of Wild Bill Hickock, a gold town sprung from a creek bed overnight, with law a long way to go before catching up.

Doug is a naive storekeeper who somehow finds himself cast between the forces of good and evil—or perhaps both evil, though we assume Gabriel is on the side of good because of his name. There's also Jack, a young blowhard whose path will cross one of the others and leave him scarred for the remainder of his short life. Doug is the observer through whose eyes the action filters, but the story is less about him than it is about the showdown between the two larger-than-life figures.

Lebbon, whose capable hands have forged a slew of excellent tales of the fantastic, falters only once or twice in this mythical narrative, mostly with easily forgivable anachronistic phrasing. For instance, "Things were getting pretty weird" might have been uttered by someone in Deadwood at this time, but it still strikes as a much more modern construction. Despite this occasional slip, the world of Deadwood seems well-invoked, and the characters play their roles with the resounding gravity of Fate and Destiny and the Plans of Unknown Architects. In other words, it's pretty damn fun to make Temple's acquaintance! But only in these pages. Cover and interior art by the immensely talented, fabulously evocative Caniglia, who never fails too stir the senses. Foreword by another purveyor of weird Westerns, Tom Piccirilli. Let's see where Tim Lebbon sends Temple next—chances are, it'll be worth the wait.