'Nada -- Daniel Boyd

Daniel Boyd is, in reality, a mild-mannered newspaper reporter for a great . . . no, wait, that's Clark Kent. Boyd is Dan Stumpf, a regular commenter here and a guy I've known for many long years, though we've never met. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up his book to read. You never want to hate a book by someone you know.

I need not have worried. 'Nada is a good one. The setting is Mexico in 1935, where Culley's the caretaker at an abandoned silver mine. He and a man named Ray make a promise about a load of gold bars to a dying man. Ray wants to carry out the promise. Culley's not so sure. He wouldn't mind having that gold for himself.

It's a story in the rousing style of something you might have run across in Adventure when that pulp was in its heyday, a tale of gold and greed and doing the right thing. It has Mexican bandits, a harrowing desert journey, one heck of a gun battle, and a narrator named Vernon Culley, who knows how to tell a tale about greed and loyalty.

The book hits the streets on September 1. Check it out.