The Devil's Revolver
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
She is Hettie Alabama — unlikely, scarred, single-minded, and blood bound to a revolver inhabited by a demon.
The first book in an epic, magic-clad series featuring the Wild West reimagined as a crosscultural stereoscope of interdimensional magic and hardship, The Devil’s Revolver opens with a shooting competition and takes off across the landscape after a brutal double murder and kidnapping — to which revenge is the only answer. Hettie Alabama, only seventeen years old, leads her crew of underdogs with her father’s cursed revolver, magicked to take a year off her life each time she fires it. It’s no way for a ranch girl to grow up, but grow up she does, her scars and determination to rescue her vulnerable younger sister deepening with every year of life she loses.
A sweeping and high-stakes saga that gilds familiar Western adventure with powerful magic and panoramic fantasy, The Devil’s Revolver is the last word and the blackest hat in the Weird West.
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This "weird west" novel from McGrath (the author of several romance novels as Vicki Essex) features vivacious heroes with tricks up their sleeves but suffers from a key villain presented as a flat caricature of power-hungry evil and from a setting grounded in fantasy and SF tropes that never quite find coherence. After the werewolf bandits of the Crowe gang make a targeted attack on 17-year-old Hettie Alabama's family, killing her parents and kidnapping her sensitive younger sister, Abby, Hettie becomes the wielder of the mage gun Diablo, which takes a year from her life with each kill. Along with "Uncle" Jeremiah, who has been keeping the gun hidden from the omnipresent Pinkerton Agency, sharpshooting healer Ling Tsang, and bounty hunter Walker Woodroffe, Hettie heads from Montana to the Mexican border to find Abby, though rescuing her may mean giving up control of the gun. Although plot hooks set up a planned sequel, Hettie and her colleagues finish this story without deep enough personal connections to fully gel them as a group. Ages 14 up.
