Product Description

Until he hung up his gunbelts to raise a family, Smoke Jensen was the last mountain man...and a force of nature. But Lee Slater and his gang of lowlife desperadoes didn't know that. Stirring up a motherlode of trouble for the retired gunslinger was Slater's first mistake. Shooting Smoke Jensen's wife Sally was his second. He wasn't going to live to make a third.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3577763 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 328 pages

From AudioFile
Once again Smoke Jensen, a penny dreadful hero if ever there was one, takes up arms against a sea of troubles. Granted, it takes very little for Jensen to take up arms, but if you like two-fisted Western stories with a moral streak a mile wide, then you'll love this production. Though lacking some of the finer touches of later MOUNTAIN MAN recordings, we find here some rudimentary audio theater in the repetitious sound effects, appropriate enough for a story that is itself a bit primitive. Narrator Doug Van Liew has a broad range of Western character voices, though his attempts at female and foreign voices are considerably less able. This is not to slight Van Liew, for he is an able narrator, and no one is perfect, especially in the Old West--and none are bulletproof. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

BIG MISTAKE
Smoke Jensen the fastest, toughest gun around decides to hang it up to get married and start a family. Now if you had lived in the same era as smoke would you even think of doing harm to Smokes wife or any off-spring? No!! But then you are not as dumb as Slater.

Barely even started it
Walk into any place that sells books and, even if they don't carry many Westerns, you're likely to always encounter two names: Louis L'Amour and William W. Johnstone. I've tried L'Amour, like most people, but burned out on his dry, heavily descriptive style -- and there was never anything about the Johnstone books that appealed to me.

But I saw Johnstone's name so often (he's still putting out new books, even though he died in 2004), I started to wonder if I was missing out on something. (This despite the fact that I usually try to avoid the immensely popular.) So, I got a copy of Code of the Mountain Man -- the 8th in the long-running "Last Mountain Man" series -- from the library just to try it out.

It's been at least a year since I put a book down before finishing the first chapter, but Code of the Mountain Man was so riddled with cliches by that time that I just couldn't stomach any more. Johnstone starts in the correct way, right in the middle of the action. A band of outlaws ride into Big Rock, Colorado, for no apparent reason and shoot up several citizens. One of the victims is the wife of Smoke Jensen, the last mountain man.

From the start, Jensen is painted as such a lone, invincible, penny dreadful-type character that it's hard to believe he could be married. But maybe he just has to be in order for there to be a reason for his revenge. He instantly begins preparations to go after the outlaws, and Johnstone goes right along with him in the kind of ridiculous language usually reserved for genre spoofs: "Nobody shot his wife. Ever."

And if that's not laughable enough, soon after comes a scene where Jensen convinces the sheriff that he'd be safer at home with his family, letting Jensen take the law into his own hands. And the sheriff agrees: "Come to think of it, my wife just baked a fresh apple pie. It'd still be warm." I was so disgusted, I threw the book on the floor -- another thing that hasn't happened in a long time. In any case, I've learned an important lesson: I've tried Code of the Mountain Man and Johnstone now and don't have to worry I'm missing out on some great writing.

The only good outlaw is a dead outlaw!
Outlaw Lee Slater is asking for trouble when he challenges Smoke Jensen's retired mentor, but when he shoots Smoke's wife, he gets more than he can handle.