Tackett & the Saloon Keeper

Following Tackett and the Teacher, this immensely likable yarn completes Nofziger's western trilogy. Here Del Tackett drifts into Shalak Springs, Colo., and promptly wins the local saloon in a poker game. Along with the real estate comes bookkeeper Annie Laurie Burns (song and poet rolled into one) and her mule Maxwelton. (In typical Nofziger wordplay, a character tells Del, ``She said something about Maxwelton's brays bein' bonnie.'') Soon Tackett's awash in bank robbers and overweening locals who take him for ``that two-bit gunslinger'' Sackett. (Another amusing conceit is Tackett's need to constantly explain that he is not Louis L'Amour's literary hero.) Also on hand is Eastern-educated Chief Two Horse, a painter who transplants the Hudson Valley school to the West and fancies himself the last of the Mohicans. Readers will quickly be drawn in by Del's two-fisted big heart and his way of getting all twisted up in his own ""dang"" ankles (as he notes, ``I said `dang' because Ma... didn't believe in swearing''). And if the characters bear occasional resemblances to certain celebrated folks-the villainous Algore, bumbling sheriff Wayne Johns, Twain Sawyer, Perow (surely not Ross) and the Smith twins, Lorrel and Hardy-well that's just more of the fun from this whimsical storyteller. (Nov.)