No Good Like It Is

                   No Good Like It Is

    No Good Like It Is  is Historical Fiction in which the protagonists, Lieutenant Dobey Walls and Corporal Jimmy Melton, meet and bond at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory in 1858.  Book One  follows their pre-war western service, then tracks them through their Civil War combat with the Eighth Texas Cavalry (Terry’s Texas Rangers).  They are part of the first and final cavalry charges of the Army of Tennessee, play a strange but factual role in the Fort Pillow Massacre, and ride with Shannon’s Raiders, nipping at Sherman’s flanks into the Carolinas. They also manage to spend some time in the White House("the second best whorehouse in Atlanta"). Throughout his combat service, Dobey agonizes that he's had no contact with his family since he left home to go to West Point in 1854.

                With surrender of the Confederacy imminent, their regimental commander learns where Dobey’s long missing family is and orders the two men to “recon to the West,” in effect to head home before they can be ordered to give up their guns and horses.  Book Two is the story of their trek from North Carolina to the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle.  Trying to travel light and fast, they’re slowed by encounters with love-starved widows, smugglers, bootleggers, freed slaves and runaways.  Then there are the murderous Home Guard, riverboat thugs, Union deserters, renegade lawmen, a drunken dentist, his prostitute assistant, pitiful refugees, and finally General Stand Watie and his Confederate Cherokees.  From these run-ins, they assemble a small army of strays to accompany them ‘home.’ Does the rag-tag group arrive at Canadian Fort, Texas, in time to save Dobey's family? Well, certainly not all of them.

                This is a winding tale of violence and tolerance, of retribution and changing racial acceptance.  It includes the humor that the author found among men in his two years of combat, but is not so picaresque as “Little Big Man,” nor as black as “No Country For Old Men.”

                                                          Amazon Reviews

No Good Like It Is by Ginny Padgett (Columbia, SC)
I don't usually like books of the Western genre, but this one is well written and the dialog and characters compelled me to keep reading. I am enamored of Doc. I'd like to see a sequel with Doc as the main character.

Compelling Read! by John W. Huffman (Columbia, SC)
One of the best civil war stories I've read in many years. Excellent characterization, moving scenes, and colorful desriptions of the old west. Couldn't put the book down, and highly recommend it to readers who savor a bygone era.

Superb Read by Pisces (SC)
A fast moving, engaging Civil War epic. Following Captain Dobey Walls and his right hand man, Sergeant Major Melton through their adventures and mis-adventures puts you in the saddle in the middle of the action of Terry's Texas Rangers and the old west. The author's visual characterizations and graphic depiction of the battles and the country that our nation was based on is both enlightening and heart warming. I highly recommend this novel and look forward to the sequel.

Photo
8th Texas Cavalry - Terry's Texas Ranger, 1862
Photo courtesy of the Military and Historical Image Bank
www.historicalimagebank.com
Painting by Don Troiani