The Notorious Reno Gang: The Wild Story of the West’s First Brotherhood of Thieves, Assassins, and Train Robbers

Evocative prose and rich historical context add depth and broad appeal to this captivating account of the men behind the first-ever robbery of a moving train, their wave of crimes in the 1860s, and their deaths at the hands of vigilantes. Many readers will be unfamiliar with the Reno brothers, but the mark they made on the small community of Seymour, Ind., is significant, Dickinson writes: “Like a boa constrictor, in the mid-19th century the Reno Gang encircled the town and squeezed tighter and tighter for several years until the gang’s activities seemed to threaten the very future of the community.” Dickinson (Falconer on the Edge) opens the story ominously, with a flash-forward as a gang of vigilantes breaks into the jail in a neighboring town in search of the Renos. She then recreates the lives of the Reno brothers, whose criminal careers were shaped by the traumas of the Civil War, which transformed them from “annoying petty thieves” into “the spiders at the center of a five-hundred-mile web of crime.” She thickens the stories with historical context about the changes that railroads brought to the country and the state of American currency at the time. (May)