Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (Caleb York #6) by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

This sixth book in the Caleb York series directly follows the events of book #5, Hot Lead, Cold Justice, in which a killer blizzard swept across the Southwest putting lives and whole ranches in peril. Trying to recover from that experience has proven no easy task. Wealthy widow and cattle baroness, Victoria Drummond, has seized the opportunity to snatch up most of the smaller ranches in the area of Trinidad, New Mexico, and now has her sites set on the vast Bar-O spread, owned and managed by Willa Cullen, the getting-close-to-fiancé-status girlfriend of one Sheriff Caleb York.

There is no level to which Victoria will not stoop to get what she wants, to include hiring an army of hard case gunfighters from nearby Las Vegas, setting up ambushes, and even sacrificing her own sons to the effort. She has the upper hand against the Bar-O due to controlling Sugar Creek, the only water supply that’s not fouled by dead cattle from the massive blizzard. So, when Sheriff York is forced to shoot and kill Victoria’s son for raping and beating a saloon trollop, a full-on range war is ignited.

Some readers expect the character of Caleb York to be simply a western version of Mike Hammer but I find Caleb to be a much more sympathetic character. He is loyal to the law and to maintaining the peace, but he is a firm stand-your-ground kind of man and never backs down from a fight. He’s an excellent shot, of course, and always manages to find plenty of action to test his skills, but he would prefer that was not the case.

The plot of this novel tests not only Caleb York’s skills with a gun but also his hot-cold-warm-hot relationship with Willa Cullen, once again. The stakes have never been higher, and the body-count is stratospheric. With the title of this novel being what it is, a lot of gunplay is expected but man-o-man was that spectacular! I was fully invested in these characters after the very first book in the series, The Legend of Caleb York, and the rest of the series has only increased that for me. So, when one of them gets such a raw deal as we see here, I’m all in for revenge in the purest sense of the word.

I really hope there are more Caleb York novels still to come. Please let it be so.