Flint's Honor

After the first two insipid volumes in the Sam Flint western trilogy (Flint's Gift and Flint's Truth), Spur Award-winning Wheeler finally strikes the right balance of suspense, humor, drama and credibility in this final installment. Flint is an itinerant newspaperman, an idealist who bums around the rough mining towns of the Old West setting up crusading weekly newspapers until he gets run out of town, which happens with clockwork regularity. In 1878 he shows up in Silver City, Colo., with his printing press, some paper and ink, and a na ve plan to oppose the established and corrupt newspaper of Digby Westminster, a ruthless and greedy editor who preys on the poor and helpless. Silver City is a boomtown, however, and the only rental space available to Flint is in the unsavory back room of a bordello; his landlady is a predictably voluptuous and kindhearted trollop inappositely named Chastity. From the doxies and tinhorns, Flint quickly learns how Westminster runs a powerful triangle to control the town. In his journalistic efforts to combat this corruption, Flint's new paper, the Silver City Sentinel, earns few friends, no money and plenty of rough handling by Westminster's scathing editorials and his street thugs. Flint's enemies are not limited to the newspaper war. Rich and arrogant mine tycoon Achilles Balthazar, his penny-pinching wife, Consuela, and brutal son, Hamlin, also conspire to be rid of Flint and his bothersome publication. Aided by Chastity and a wacky and brilliant typesetter named Napoleon, Flint fights back with some nifty journalistic tactics that turn the town upside-down and drive his enemies crazy. This conclusion to the trilogy has pizzazz. Shrewdly plotted and refreshingly entertaining, it is by far the best of the three. (July)