Franklin's Crossing

In this ambitious historical novel set 10 years after the Civil War, Moses Franklin, a former Virginia slave who has become one of the few black scouts in the West, is hired to take 100 settlers on a tortuous journey across dangerous North Texas Indian country to Santa Fe, N.M. His abilities are constantly second-guessed by the settlers' leader, Cleve Graham, a former Union Army officer who ``lost a hand at Shiloh and a son at Gettysburg''; Graham also mistrusts his own business partner, Jack Sterling, a thief whose stolen whiskey is the wagon train's main cargo. All three see the journey as the fulfillment of their dreams: Franklin seeks to use pay from this last job to found a town in the plains, to be settled by former slaves; Graham will use the profits from the whiskey (which he doesn't know is stolen) to buy his own piece of Western land; and Sterling wants to flee the law and his family. However, they become the target of fierce Comanche warriors set on reclaiming a medicine bag stolen by a girl who looked remarkably like Sterling's tough-talking daughter, whose troubles with her father mirror those of the other settlers' dysfunctional families. Reynolds ( The Vigil ) achieves a Louis L'Amour-style realism in depicting the settlers' miserable lives, and his presentation of the tormented personal histories of the main characters helps sustain interest over 600 pages. But this grim, relentless, sprawling Western is undercut by an almost obsessive use of detail and clumsy or cliched language, and it includes scenes of violence that would make even Stephen King's hair stand on end. (May)