Occasionally I type the word “railroad” into audiobook apps to see what’ll pop up. Mostly I get the usual suspects of dry history books, but a few weeks ago an enticing cover caught my eye: Wolf Stockburn, Railroad Detective. Written by first-time author Max O’Hara, the book follows the titular detective solving train robberies on the newly-completed transcontinental railroad.
What I expected was a Book for Dads with some occasional spurts of train-based action and intrigue. What I got was a book that genuinely spurred me to return to fiction writing. Not because it’s a good book, heavens no. If anything, I read the sequel Hell’s Jaw Pass purely to see if the inherent problems of Wolf Stockburn were systemic or just first-novel hiccups.
They were not.
Continue reading “Wolf Stockburn: Failroad Detective”
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