The story captures you from the beginning and hold you until the end. With lots of action and adventure that the lead character goes through. Good read.

One of my all time favorite authors to pick up and just set back and read , which means I tend to get lost in his books which is always packed with non stop action from start to finish

A new Johnstone series!!!!! I'm giving it five stars and five exclamation points!!!! Hunter is the newest main character in a Johnstone series. He's the good guy although doesn't mean he's a pushover or willing to let the bad guys get away with murder. As in all Johnstone books, the action is realistic for the period and the adventures are fast and furious. Hunter is trying to live a peaceful life...a common theme in Johnstone books...but the bad guys won't let him. So, he takes the fight back to them in such a way that you'll be rooting for him all the way and anxiously waiting for the next book in the series!

Once again a Johnstone book teaches as well as providing a great story. The book may be fiction, but it’s pushing its way toward the historical fiction genre. The back stories of the characters help so much the set the stage as well as shape the characters. The only thing I knew about The Black Hills was that it was the home of Mount Rushmore. But now I will be rushing to read more books in what I hope will be a long series of tremendous action-filled adventures.

In J.A. Johnstone's The Black Hills (Penguin Random House 2018), all Hunter and Annabel want to do is get married but that would be too simple. Annabel’s father wants her to marry a man who will benefit his business and Hunter is a proud Rebel from the defeated South in a Yankee-ruled town. Hunter had enough of killing in the war--it was something he did quite well and often for the Confederates. When he came home after the war, he put his guns aside, swearing to solve problems peaceably. But when Annabel must flee her wealthy home steps ahead of a vindictive brother and a crazed father, everything explodes. Her father will stop at nothing to get his daughter back and into his pre-arranged marriage. When he targets Hunter's family, Hunter gives up on peace and we find out just how skilled he is at fighting the good fight, no matter the odds against him.

The characters in this story, Book 1 of J.A. Johnstone's new Hunter Buchanan series, are strong and likable with the morals and fortitude you expect from the good guys of the old West. The story is well developed with enough backstory to understand the characters' choices and problems. One of my favorites is Bobby Lee, a rescued coyote who loves nothing more than his human master, Hunter. The star-crossed love story between Annabelle and Hunter becomes the western version of the Capulets and the Montagues. The two families were on opposite sides of the civil war and now, their children are in love. This is a painful story of passion and loss that plays out as they pursue their future. 

Great lines that place you right in the old West:

"Hunter felt more and more like he’d been run over by a runaway freight train deadheading on a long downhill stretch of open rail with a firebox filled to its brim."

"Gray tailings stretched down the mountain below the mine, around which was a beehive of activity including men at work with picks and shovels, handcars rolling in and out of the mine portals, thundering ore drays traversing trails switchbacking up and down the mountain’s face, as well as the constant, reverberating hammering of the stamping mill in its giant timber frame at the base of the ridge, behind the barrack-like, wood-frame mine office."

"As if he and every other Southerner in the county didn’t know that Frank Stillwell and his deputies used the Stars and Bars, Old Dixie, the Rebel Flag—the guidon for which so many Brothers of the Southern Confederacy had made the ultimate sacrifice—to scrub the mud and horse dung from their boots."
Overall, another excellent Western in a new series by an author who never fails to entertain.

--to be published in my blog, WordDreams, Feb. 2019

Black Hills is a part of A Hunter Buchanon series. I thought it was a great read. I am giving it four and a half stars. Recommended.