Logspur is a small and dangerously isolated community in the rugged logging country of northern California. The town's lumber baron, Henry Johnston, is a fanatic right-wing paramilitarist who has a cache of illegal weapons and ammo in two old freight cars. The ordnance is slated for a secret bivouac in Florida. Three hardcase criminals-Zacharias, Frame and Tully-get wind of the cache and, in an attempt to hijack it, cause an explosion. In a matter of minutes the town is encircled by an inferno. Steve Hannigan, a would-be writer and dropout from life, helps to organize the townspeople for the only way out: an antique Baldwin locomotive that, miraculously, still runs. He and the other men attach the two passenger cars that are coupled to the freight cars. They are unaware of the deadly shipment they will be hauling through the long miles to the county seat at Springwood. They are also unaware that Zacharias and Tully have boarded the train, still determined to hijack its lethal contents.
The tension of the fiery race on buckling tracks and across burning bridges is heightened by the antagonism between Hannigan and Jim Maxon, an embittered one-legged logger whose wife, Regina, is in love with Hannigan. The friction inside the cab leads to near disaster when they are only a few miles from safety.
This is a big novel of sacrifice, courage, love and searing suspense.
Bill Pronzini is simply one of the masters. He seems to have taken a crack at just about every genre: mysteries, noirish thrillers, historicals, locked-room mysteries, adventure novels, spy capers, men's action, westerns, and, of course, his masterful, long-running Nameless private detective series, now entering its fourth decade, with no signs of creative flagging. He's also ghosted several Brett Halliday short stories as Michael Shayne for Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, and has managed to collaborate with such fellow writers as John Lutz, Barry Wahlberg, Collin Wilcox and Marcia Muller. Still, if he never ventured into fiction writing, his non-fiction work, as both writer and editor, would still earn him a place in the P.I. genre's Hall of Fame. Besides his two tributes to some of the very worst in crime fiction (what he calls "alternative classics"), Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, and one on western fiction (entitled Six Gun in Cheek, naturally), he's the co-author (with Marcia Muller) of 1001 Midnights. The Mystery Writers of America have nominated him for Edgar Awards several times and his work has been translated into numerous languages and he's published in almost thirty countries. He was the very first president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and he's received three Shamus Awards from them, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. His passion for the old crime pulps is largely responsible for keeping them in the public's eye. He's amassed a huge collection of books and magazines and has always been an omnivorous reader; all of which made him a natural when it came to editing various anthologies. He admits "it was a pleasure tracking down good stories to fit a particular anthology theme." But after editing 80 or so of them over a period of twenty-some years, he decided it was "more than enough."
