STEVE CARROLL WRITES

The Laramie River   Crossing  (1973) by Jack Ehrlich After a career as a lawyer, a district attorney, and a reporter for Newsday, Jack Ehrlich started writing fiction late in life. Thank God, because  The Laramie River Crossing  is stunning—a lean, mean, hard-edged adult-oriented western that left me hungry to read everything by the author.  This is a genuinely literary novel that takes the time to craft characters of real depth with myriad shades of gray. Smith (no first name given), and Preacher are bad men with a history of violence and crime. The first half of the book has a classic “men on a mission” set-up as Preacher goes about putting their previous crime ring back together at the behest of The Limey, their old handler and heist mastermind.  Preacher is not above bushwhacking his former colleagues or breaking them out of jail to force their involvement. The plot itself is deceptively simple...

Close Combat  (1969)   by Jack Ehrlich I recently discovered and developed a deep appreciation for author Jack Ehrlich through his remarkable western,  The Laramie River Crossing . Ehrlich writes hard-edged, gritty books with painfully realistic characters navigating tricky plots while fighting their own base desires for violence and moral decay.  Such is the case with  Close Combat, a Vietnam-set tale that starts off deceptively resembling a straight-up “men on a mission” war adventure. Our main character, J.J. Hogan, is hand-picked to lead a force into the jungles of Cambodia to destroy The Monster, a top-secret radar installation that is decimating US air power in the region. The task is likely a suicide mission, but critical to the US war machine. The catch is that every aspect of the mission has to remain deniable for the US government, whether successful or not.  This geo...