Product Description

Winner of the 2009 Spur Award for Best First Novel by the Western Writers of America, as a “work whose inspirations, image and literary excellence best represent the reality and spirit of the American West." December 1863. Daniel Stark, New York lawyer and radical abolitionist, has come to the gold fields of Alder Gulch, in what will become Montana, to get enough gold to make restitution to the clients whose assets his father gambled away before killing himself. But where ruffians rule and murder is tolerated, Dan realizes that he will likely not survive to take his gold home unless he joins with others, Union and Confederate sympathizers alike, who form a Vigilante group to establish law and order. With Dan as Vigilante prosecutor, they hunt down suspected members of a criminal conspiracy operating in the area. As the Vigilantes identify and try the conspirators in secret tribunals, Dan faces the horrible prospect of hanging both a friend and the husband of the woman he loves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #846266 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-27
• Released on: 2008-06-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

About the Author
Descended from Montana pioneers and homesteaders, Carol Buchanan is a long-time nonfiction writer and student of Montana history. Now she turns to historical fiction in God’s Thunderbolt, The Vigilantes of Montana. The germ of the novel lodged in her mind years before, during a trip to Virginia City, MT, when she stood in the Hangman’s Building and heard the ropes creak. Dr. Buchanan has also published books on horticulture and horticultural history. Wordsworth’s Gardens (2002, Texas Tech University Press) was not only a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards for 2002, but also the subject of a slide presentation and talk at the Smithsonian Institution. Her short story, “Comes a Stranger,” based on her grandmother’s encounter with the Sundance Kid, appeared online in the summer 2008 issue of New-Works Review (http://new-works.org).

Customer Reviews

UNIVERSAL APPEAL: A NEW HISTORICAL FICTION THAT INFORMS AS WELL AS ENTERTAINS
The best historical fiction is a labor of love and here author Carol Buchanan details a hidden history of her native Montana at a time when civil authority was noticeable only by its absence and decent people were struggling to survive. Set during the Civil War, the tensions between Confederate and Union veterans seeking gold complicate the basic problem of justice when a young man is murdered. Daniel Stark, a complicated man with problems of his own, finds himself drawn back into a discarded law career to act as a prosecutor in a murder trial while resisting a thunderbolt that strikes his own soul when he falls deeply in love with the wife of a friend. Stark's personal mission is to earn enough wealth to overcome the disgrace of his father's embezzlement and suicide and redeem his family's honor back in New York state.
To do that he has to not just find gold but survive the harsh conditions he faces. Those include not just Montana's winters, but the criminal element. joining with like-minded men, he turns Vigilante to re-establish the rule of law. This is, by turns, a Western, a legal thriller, a mystery and a love story all of which are anchored in the tale of a man's coming to terms with his own morality and character. It's a lot to get into one book, but it works.

This is one of the most interesting novels I have read lately. Buchanan has avoided the rookie trap of becoming hostage to her own research and the details
set the scene while not bogging the reader down in needless detail. The moral dilemmas drive the story as Stark and his love interest struggle against their own desires to do what is right and proper. She provides vivid characterization and dialog that makes this novel a real page-turner. The story line is rendered economically and logically. We hope to see more from this author in the future. Highly recommended

God's Thunderbolt
Written at the pace of a screenplay with the sinew of great literature, "God's Thunderbolt" is a story of resistance to the brutal regime that existed in the muddy, lawless ground of Alder Gulch in the Montana Territory of 1863. When efforts to obtain constitutional rights and protections for the territory failed, men of conscience knew their only option was to deal directly with the gang that ruled the lives of those who could only pray for benign influence and had tangible reason to fear malignant power.
Daniel Stark is a lawyer who has journeyed alone from New York to earn salvation for a family disgraced by debt and suicide. A vigilance group forms over the grave of an innocent murdered for his gold, and Dan's personal struggle begins over the letter of the law and the spirit of it. He has to rely on the letter of the law to prevent further wrongful deaths and the spirit of the law to impede the lawless. Either path calls for his personal sacrifice.
Carol Buchanan has given us a window on the grinding vulnerability of life in a mining camp. Award winning Richard S. Wheeler has called God's Thunderbolt `...one of the greatest historical novels set in Montana.' I humbly agree.

Not Anything Like a Traditional Western
At first, or even a second glance this historical novel might appear to be a simple Western, an action-packed account of good guys versus bad guys and wild adventure on an even wilder frontier, as uncomplicated as old B-western movie. But it is a more subtle and complicated narrative, part court-room drama and police procedural, and a closely observed portrait of an isolated community, a community nearly as alien to Americans of the 21st century as something from another planet - Virginia City, Montana, during the last years of the Civil War. Virginia City is a mining camp, a temporary place of shacks and tents, tenuously connected to the greater world by a stage line and by men on horseback carrying messages. It is a dirty, brawling place, of mostly men, searching for gold in the rocky creek-beds, or prying it out of holes painstakingly grubbed in the ground, and taking their comforts where they can. But it is a community. Some of its residents are former soldiers, of the Union or the Confederacy, some have brought families; all have set aside their previous lives or professions in the quest for gold. They get along as best they can, each with their own memories and secrets to hide ... until the discovery of a dead body. The body is that of a young man, well-liked and popular in Virginia City - and it becomes clear that he was murdered. His shocked and grieving friends and kin begin looking into the circumstances of his death, thereby pulling the loose end of a string of coincidence that begins to unravel everything they thought they knew about each other.

That growing sense of horror is particularly well done, as men like Daniel Stark, a well-born young lawyer come to the mines to get enough gold to get his disgraced family out of debt, begin to realize that many of the robberies and murders that have occurred in and around Virginia City have been committed by an organized gang. The horror is compounded when Dan and his friends and colleagues pursuing justice realize that those perpetrating such depredations are well-liked, even trusted members of the community. It is a gripping and detailed read, the story of well-meaning men who respect the law, having to take their courage and their future in their own hands, at a time and in a place where there was no law, no means at all to protect life and property, other than what men and women of honor could do for themselves. The characters are efficiently drawn, but the sense of place is even more convincing. There is no way to mistake God's Thunderbolt for a B-western movie adventure - this vivid and carefully researched account made for someone who really wants to know what the Old West really looked like.